The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (40 page)

Truslow was hit in the thigh. He cursed, clapped a hand on the bleeding wound, then scrabbled in his pouch for a tin of moss and spider's web that he had kept for this moment. He ripped his pants leg apart, gritted his teeth, then stuffed the mixture into the entry and exit wounds. He rammed the moss and web in, suffering the pain, then picked up his rifle and looked for the son of a bitch who had shot at him. Robert Decker was crawling among the dead, rescuing cartridges, which he tossed to the living. Potter was firing and loading, firing and loading, always keeping his front toward the enemy so that no bullet struck the precious bottle of whiskey in his pack.

The Yankee line seemed to thicken rather than thin. More blue-coated troops were coming down the funnel to stiffen the attack, and now a Northern gun team galloped right into the cornfield and slewed about in a shower of dirt and broken stalks to position their cannon on a slight rise of ground that lay at the field's northern margin. A gun horse went down to a blast of rebel case-shot. It screamed and flailed at the air with its hooves. It thrashed its neck, spraying blood while a gunner cut it out from the rest of the panicking team that he ran back out of rifle range. Another gunner shot the wounded horse, then his companions fired their first shot—a shell that landed plumb in the center of the rebel line. The Yankee gunners were screaming at their own infantry to clear a field of fire so they could load with canister. "We can't last," Truslow growled to Starbuck.

"Jesus," Starbuck said. If Truslow sensed defeat, then disaster must be close. He knew Truslow was right, but still he did not want to admit it. The Yankees had come within an ace of breaking the fragile line, and when that line was dead or captured they would charge across the plateau's top to pierce the very center of Lee's army. The rebels were still enduring the Northern fire, but Starbuck guessed that most, like him, were simply too scared to run away. A man trying to retreat across the plateau would make himself an easy target and it seemed safer to crouch low behind barriers of the dead and keep on fighting.

The Yankee gun in the cornfield coughed a barrel of canister that churned dead and living flesh before ricocheting on into the pasture behind. A rebel gun was hand-spiked round to fire at the Yankee cannon, but a group of blue skirmishers killed the rebel gun crew. A color bearer in the Yankee lines waved a flag and Starbuck saw the arms of his home state, Massachusetts. A foolhardy Northern officer galloped a horse behind his men, encouraging them. Such men made choice targets, but the rebels were too few and too desperate to do anything now but pour a blind fire straight into the gunsmoke in hope of keeping the overwhelming Yankee mass away. More Northern canister crashed from the gun in the cornfield and more rebels died. Truslow's leg was soaked in blood. "You should see a doctor," Starbuck said. He was shaking, not with fear, but with a desperate excitement. He had one cartridge left.

Truslow gave a short efficient opinion of all doctors, then fired before dropping down behind a corpse that offered some cover as he reloaded. The corpse twitched as a bullet struck home with the meaty sound of an ax blow. Starbuck had reloaded his revolver during the pause between attacks and now fired all its chambers at the nearest group of Yankees. Truslow was right, he thought. They should retreat, but a retreat would become a rout. Better, perhaps, to lie here and let the victorious Yankees roll right over the line. He rammed his last cartridge into his rifle and peered across a corpse to find a final useful target. "Sons of bitches," he said vengefully.

Then, suddenly, there was a screaming sound, an exultant sound, a high-pitched wailing terror of a sound, and he looked to his left and saw a new rebel unit streaming across the pasture. Some of the newcomers were in gray, some in butternut, but most wore the remnants of the gaudy
zouave
uniforms with which they had begun the war. It was the Louisiana Tigers, a fearful regiment of scoundrels from New Orleans, and it charged right past the rebel line, with bayonets fixed and with their battle flag streaming in the smoke. A sudden salvo of shells burst among the regiment, but the ranks closed up and screamed relentlessly on.

"Forward!" Truslow shouted. "Come on, you bastards!"

Astonishingly, the frail rebel line rose from among the dead. The Yankees, taken by surprise, seemed to pause in sheer disbelief. It was their turn to see the dead come to savage life. "Come on!" Truslow shouted. He was limping, but nothing would stop him.

"Bayonets!" Starbuck shouted.

It seemed a terrible madness had cloaked the rebel line. It was on the verge of rout, but, spurred by the Louisiana Tigers, it charged forward instead of running back. Men were screaming the rebel yell as they ran. The Yankees in the cornfield offered one scattered volley, then began to retreat. Some, unwilling to abandon their victory, shouted at their comrades to stay in the cornfield and those men formed small groups to resist the broken rebel charge.

The rebel yell was the song of those men's death. For a few brief seconds the two sides clashed in the corn. Bayonets parried bayonets, but the rebels outnumbered the Northerners who had stayed to fight. Starbuck, unaware that he was screaming like a maniac, banged a rifle and bayonet to one side, then lunged his own blade into a face. He kicked the man as he fell, reversed his rifle, and hammered the bullet-splintered stock down into the bloody face.

A volley sounded. The Yankees had reformed north of the cornfield and were po
uring volley fire at the Louisi
anans. More fire came from the woods on either side of the cornfield. There were Yankees in both.

"Back! Back!" someone shouted, and the rebels ran back through the cornfield to their old position. Starbuck paused long enough to loot the cartridges from the man he had wounded, then ran after his men. Bullets whip-sawed from either side. He was aware of bodies everywhere: sprawling, broken, explosive-torn, mangled, dismembered bodies—white bones and brain, blue intestines, sheets of blood. Some men lay on their own, but most were in groups where they had been cut down by canister and some, horrifically, moved slowly beneath their carapaces of fly-crawling blood. A man moaned, another called on God, a third coughed feebly. Starbuck crouched as he ran, then at last he was out of the cornfield and back in the rebel line. Potter had been wounded. A bayonet had slashed off half his left ear, which now dangled amid a blood-soaked hank of hair. "Just a scratch," he insisted, "just a scratch. The whiskey's safe."

The rebel line lay down again. Men shared canteens and doled out cartridges they found in dead men's pouches. The Yankees had regrouped, but they seemed unwilling to go back into the cornfield that had become a slaughter
-
yard for both sides. Instead they crouched while the rebel canister whipped the air overhead and their own guns returned the fire. The lone gun on the slight knoll in the field had been abandoned, but there were other Yankee guns close behind it and those guns were firing away. Starbuck aimed at one of the gunners, then decided to save his ammunition.

He stood. The blood in the small of his back had crusted his shirt and now that crust pulled painfully away to wash a gush of warm liquid down his buttocks. His throat was parched, his eyes raw with smoke, and his bones aching with weariness. He found the Irishman who had been telling his beads before the battle and sent him back to the springhouse with a dozen canteens. "Go easy now," he told him. "Give the trees a wide berth." The Yankee sharpshooters were back at the edge of the East Woods, though the smoke that lingered in the windless air was spoiling their aim, and their fire, which would have been terrifying in another circumstance, seemed puny after the tempest of rifle fire that had preceded the Louisianan charge.

Colonel Maitland was lying face down close to the Smoketown Road. Starbuck did not recognize the man until he crouched beside him and tugged at Maitland's pouch in hopes of finding some pistol cartridges. "I'm not dead," Maitland's muffled voice protested, "I'm praying."

Starbuck touched the canteen at Maitland's belt. "You got water?"

"It is not water, Starbuck," Maitland sa
id reprovingly, "it is cordial.
Help yourself."

It was neat rum. Starbuck coughed as the raw liquor hit his powder-abraded throat, then spat the rest onto the grass.

Maitland rolled over and retrieved the canteen. "Good things are wasted on you, Starbuck," he said reprovingly. The Colonel, having confiscated the Legion's liquor, must have drunk most of it, for he was helplessly drunk. A bullet hit a nearby gun barrel with a great clang like a cracked bell struck. The gunners spiked their piece around and gave the Yankees in the East Woods a dose of canister. Maitland lay back on the grass and stared at the gunsmoke churning in the blue sky. "When you were a child," he said dreamily, "did you find summer endless?"

"And winter," Starbuck said, sitting beside the Colonel.

"Of course. You're a Yankee. Sleighbells and snow. I once rode in a sleigh. I was only a child, but I remember the snow was like a cloud around us. But our winter is slush and impassable roads." Maitland fell silent for a moment. "I'm not sure I can stand," he finally said in a pathetic voice.

"No need at the moment."

"I have been sick," Maitland said solemnly.

"No one knows," Starbuck said, though in fact the front of the Colonel's elegant uniform was thick with vomit. It had caked in the yellow braid and lodged behind the glittering buttons.

"The truth is," Maitland said very solemnly, "that I cannot abide the sight of blood."

"Kind of a drawback for a soldier," Starbuck said mildly.

Maitland closed his eyes for a moment. "So what's happening?"

"We drove the bastards off again."

"They'll come back," Maitland said darkly.

"They'll come back." Starbuck stood and took the canteen out of the Colonel's nerveless fingers and emptied the rum onto the ground. "I'll get you some water, Colonel."

"I'm very much obliged to you," Maitland said, still staring at the sky.

Starbuck walked back to the ravaged battle line. Swynyard was staring across the cornfield with vacant eyes. His right cheek was twitching as it had done when he had been a drunkard. He looked up at Starbuck and it took him a moment to recognize the younger man. "Can't do that again," he said grimly. "One more attack and we're done, Nate."

"I know, sir."

Swynyard took out his revolver and tried to reload it, but his right hand was shaking too much. He gave the gun to Starbuck. "Would you mind, Nate?"

"Are you hit, sir?"

Swynyard shook his head. "Just dazed." He stood up slowly. "I stood too close to a shell burst, Nate, but God spared me. I wasn't touched, just dizzied." He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. "I've sent for cartridges," he said carefully, "and water's coming. There are no more men. Haxall's hurt bad. Got a lump of iron in his belly. He won't last. I'm sorry about Haxall. I like him."

"Me, too."

"I haven't seen Maitland," Swynyard said. "Thank you, Nate," this was for loading the revolver that the Colonel now returned to its holster.

"Maitland's still here," Starbuck said.

"So he didn't run away? Good for him." The Colonel glanced up and down his line. On paper he commanded a brigade, but the men left in the firing line would hardly have constituted a regiment in the prewar army and the brigade's various battalions had become inextricably mixed as Swynyard had fed men into the battle, so that now men simply clung to their friends or nearest neighbors while officers and sergeants looked after whoever was within sight. "The textbook," Swynyard said, "would probably suggest we disentangle ourselves and get back into our proper battalions, but I think we'll forget the textbook. They'll fight just as well as they are." He meant, Starbuck suspected, that they would die just as well, and indeed, at that moment, it seemed impossible that they should do anything but die. The Yankees were quiet, but that lull would not last, for Starbuck could see more blue coats showing beyond the jagged wreckage of the cornfield. The enemy had attacked twice, and twice they had been thrown back, but now the Yankees gathered their forces for the next advance.

Starbuck sent Lucifer to Maitland with a canteen of water. The boy came back grinning. "One happy man, the Colonel," he said.

"He's not the first to get drunk on a battlefield,"
Starbuck
said.

"Mister Tumlin," Lucifer happily reported more news, "is wearing a new coat. All bloody."

Starbuck no longer cared about Tumlin, nor Dennison. He would deal with them after the battle, if there was anything left to deal with. Now, back among the dead who sheltered the living in the shell-blackened pasture, he waited for the Yankees.

Whose drums began to sound again. Whose guns opened fire again.

For the third attack was coming.

Two miles to the south, where the Antietam Creek turned sharply westward as it ran down to the Potomac, a whole corps of the United States army waited in hiding on the creek's eastern bank. Twenty-nine battalions of hardened troops, backed by guns, were ready to cross the river and slash north toward the road that ran west from Sharpsburg. Once that road was captured then all Lee's troops north of the town would be cut off from their retreat, and this corps was the lower jaws of that terrible trap.

Some of the troops were sleeping. Others cooked breakfast. The rebels knew they were there, for the rebel artillery across the creek kept up a harassing fire, but the Northern troops were concealed by woods and reverse slopes and the rebel shells whirred overhead to explode harmlessly in woods or pastures.