The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (42 page)

But then all hell broke loose on the cornfield's far side
.

* * *

General McClellan dabbed at his lips with a napkin, then brushed crumbs of toast from his lap. He was aware of the gaze of the civilian spectators and he kept a stern look on his face so that none of those onlookers would be aware of the worries that racked him.

He was risking a trap. He knew it instinctively, even if he did not know just what form the trap would take. Lee outnumbered him, he was sure, and Lee was fighting a defensive battle and that could only mean that the enemy was disguising his intentions. Somewhere in the landscape a mass of rebels was waiting to attack, and McClellan was determined not to be caught by that surprise assault. He would hold men in reserve to counter it. He would frustrate Lee. He would preserve the army.

"Sir?" An aide stooped beside McClellan's chair. "Dan'l Webster, sir, he's unhappy."

"Unhappy?" McClellan asked. Daniel Webster was his horse.

"The civilians, sir, they're plucking his tail hairs. As souvenirs, sir. We could ask them to move, sir? Up the hill, maybe?"

"There must be a stable?"

"He's in the stable, sir."

"Then shut it!" McClellan did not want to lose his audience. He rather enjoyed their admiration. Indeed, stretching his legs once in a while, he liked to chat with them and assure them that all was well. There was no need to worry mere civilians with his concerns, or tell them that he had telegraphed Washington with an urgent request that every Northern soldier available should be hurried west toward the army. Those soldiers could not of course reach the battlefield in time to join the fight, but they might provide a rear guard behind which his army could retire if Lee's masterstroke brought chaos. The hotheads in his army, fools like Colonel Thorne, might wonder why he did not unleash the men poised to cross the river and attack the rebels' flank, but those fools did not understand the army's danger.

More men marched down to the creek whe
re the col
umns waited for the order to cross. One unit sang "John Brown's Body" as they marched close to the Pry farm and McClellan scowled. He hated that song and had tried to forbid it being sung. So far as McClellan was concerned there had been nothing to admire in John Brown's foolish adventure. The man had tried to start a slave rebellion, for God's sake, and his hanging, McClellan believed, had been richly rewarded. He tried to ignore the music as he stooped to his telescope to watch the troops on the creek's far side, who were forming up for a new attack on the smoke-wreathed woods. "That's Mansfield's corps?" he asked an aide.

"Yes, sir."

"Tell them to go!"

He would let Mansfield attack and see what happened. At best they would push Lee's men back and at worst they would provoke the dreaded riposte. McClellan almost prayed for that riposte to happen, for then, at least, the fears would take solid shape and he would know just what he had to deal with. But for now he would go on attacking in the north and stay alert for the horror he knew must come.

Three miles away, in a grove of trees near Sharpsburg, Robert Lee stared at a map. He was not studying the map, indeed he was hardly aware that he was looking at it. Belvedere Delaney was among the aides who hovered nearby. The General liked Delaney and had invited him to keep him company. It was good to have someone slightly irreverent, someone who offered amusement rather than advice.

A crescendo of firing sounded from the higher ground north of the town. In a moment, Lee knew, the gunsmoke would billow above the skyline to mark where the fighting had erupted so suddenly. "That's it," he said mildly.

"It?" Delaney asked.

Lee smiled. "Hood's men, Delaney, almost our last reserves. Not, to be honest, that they were reserves." Lee had ruthlessly stripped troops from the southern part of his battle line to preserve the army's northern perimeter so that now, beyond a fragile skin of troops that edged the creek, he had nothing to fight an outflanking attack from the south.

"So what do we do?" Delaney asked.

"Put our trust in McClellan, of course," Lee said with a smile, "and pray that Ambrose Hill reaches us in time."

The Light Division was marching as it had never marched before. It was still south of the Potomac and a long way from the ford at Shepherdstown, but the ever-present sound of the big guns was the summons that kept them moving. Staff officers rode up and down the long column urging the men on. Marching troops were usually given ten minutes' rest an hour, but not today. Today there could be no rest, just marching. The dust kicked up from the dry road choked men's throats, some limped on bare bleeding feet, but no one straggled. If a man dropped out he dropped like the dead, dropped out of sheer exhaustion, but most kept grimly going. They had no breath to sing, not even to speak, just to march and march and march. To where the guns were sounding and the piles of dead grew high.

general john hood's
division burst out of the West Woods to hit the flank of the attacking Yankees like a tidal wave. Most of Hood's men were Texans, but he had battalions from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina in his ranks, and all were veterans. They stopped the Yankee advance dead on the turnpike, then spread their battle line across the pasture, where they faced north toward the cornfield. One volley was enough to decimate the Yankees advancing through the corn, then the Texans were screaming the rebel yell and plunging forward with bayonets. Some small groups of Yankees resisted and were cut down, but most just fled. The North's attack was spent, the rebel counter-attack was surging, and the survivors of the old defense line, the battered, bleeding men from Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia, went forward with Hood's men.

The Yankee artillery by the North Woods took up the battle. They could not use canister, for the ground in front of them was littered with wounded Northerners, and so they cut their shell fuses as short as they dared and opened fire. The shells crashed into the cornfield, flinging men aside and adding a new skein of smoke to the cirrus-like canopy that hung above the trampled crop. The noise reached a new and dreadful intensity. The Northern gunners worked frantically, double-shotting some guns to belch out pairs of shells that exploded a heartbeat after

firing. The guns by the turnpike were unhampered by wounded men and they t
urned their canister on the Tex
ans advancing on the road. One barrel load of bullets ripped up forty feet of snake fence and drove its splintered remnants into a company of rebels. Yankee infantry appeared from the North Woods to add their volley fire, and ail the while the rebel cannon lobbed their long-fused shells over the flags of Hood's Division to harry the Northern gunners.

The Yankee gunners at the northern edge of the cornfield died hard. They tried to keep the fight going, but they were in easy range of the Texan skirmishers and one by one the guns were abandoned. Still the Confederates drove forward, skirting the piles of dead and dying in the cornfield, struggling through the rage of bullet and shell as though they could sweep the Yankees clear up to Hag-erstown and beyond. Some officers tried to check their men, knowing they were advancing too far, but no voice could be heard in the tempest of iron and lead. The battle had become a gutter fight, rage against rage, men dying in a cornfield that had become death's kingdom.

A regiment from Mississippi pursued the broken Yankees toward the northern edge of the broken corn, sure they were chasing shattered troops to utter defeat, but the Yankees had Pennsylvanian infantry waiting at the rail fence. The blue-coated riflemen were lying down, resting their barrels on the fence's lowest rail. A standing man could see nothing but smoke, but at ground level the waiting infantry could see the legs of the attackers.

They waited. Waited till the rebels were just thirty paces off, then loosed a volley that ripped into Hood's men and silenced the screaming rebel yells in one curt blow. For an instant, an odd, mind-numbing instant, there was a silence on the battlefield as though the wings of death's angel were sweeping overhead, but then the silence passed as the Pennsylvanians stood up to reload and their ramrods clattered in hot barrels and the Northern guns jarred back on their trails to add more carnage to the slaughter in the corn. The front rank of the Confederates was a horror of writhing bodies, blood, and moans. A man snatched up the fallen banner of Mississippi and was shot down. A second man gripped the flag by its fringe and dragged it back through the corn as the Pennsylvanians fired a second volley that thumped into flesh with brutal force. The flag fell again, riddled with bullets. A third man seized the banner and raised it high, then walked backward from the blazing rifle fire until he was driven down with bullets in
his belly, groin, and chest. A fourth man speared the flag on his bayonet and pulled it back to where the survivors of his battalion were forming a crude line to return the Pennsylvanian fire. The space between the two lines seemed to be a shifting mass of dirt, a heaving, crawling pile of giant maggots that blindly struggled to find safety. It was the wounded pushing the dead away and trying to rejoin their comrades.

The right flank of Hood's attack swept into the East Woods. There, protected by the battered trees from the effects of the Northern guns, the Texans drove into the Yankees, who were advancing southward. Men fought within spitting distance. For a time the two sides traded shots, neither willing to retreat and neither able to advance, but slowly the rebel fire gained the advantage as more men came from the pasture. The Yankees retreated and the retreat became hurried as the rebels pushed forward with bayonets.

Starbuck and his men were weary, bruised, wounded, and parched, but they fought among the trees with the desperation of soldiers who believed that one last effort would rid them of their enemies. Again and again the Yankees had come forward, and again and again they had been pushed back, and this time it seemed as if they could be pushed clear back out of the woods altogether. One group of Northerners turned a pile of cordwood into a miniature redoubt. Their rifle barrels spat long flames over the logpile, the tongues of fire oddly bright in the shadow of the trees. Starbuck used his revolver, firing at murderously close range into the Yankees, who suddenly abandoned the logs as a rush of screaming Texans swept up from their right. A small black dog stayed with its dead master, running back and forth and barking piteously as the rebels ran past. Starbuck unslung his rifle, paused to reload it, then ran on toward the fighting. He came to the road that ran through the woods and crouched" at its edge, watching as Yankees dashed across to escape the charge. He fired, saw a man sprawl in the grass that grew down the road's center, then he sprinted over the dirt road himself. The fight seemed to be dying as the Yankees legged it out of the trees and so he squatted by a limestone knoll and began the laborious business of reloading the revolver.

Lucifer ran over the road, leading the black dog on a makeshift leash of two rifle slings. "You shouldn't be here," Starbuck said, making space for the boy behind the knoll.

"I always wanted a dog," Lucifer said proudly. "Got to find him a name."

"There are still Yankees in the wood," Starbuck said, pushing down the lever that rammed the revolver's chambers.

"I shot one," Lucifer said.

"You damn fool," Starbuck said fondly. "They're fighting for your freedom." He levered down the last chamber, then upturned the gun to push on the percussion caps.

"I'd have shot more," Lucifer said, "only the gun don't work." He offered Starbuck his revolver. The trigger hung limp.

"It needs a new stop spring," Starbuck said, handing the gun back, "but you shouldn't be fighting. Hell, these bastards are trying to liberate you and you're killing the poor sons of bitches." Lucifer did not answer. Instead he frowned at his gun and twitched the trigger in hope that it would engage on some part of the mechanism. The small dog whimpered and he soothed it. It was a puppy, scarce weaned, with coarse black hair, a snub nose, and a stump of a tail. "The bastards will kill you," Starbuck warned him. "You and your dog."

"So I die," Lucifer said defiantly. "And in heaven we get to be the masters and you all are our slaves."

Starbuck grinned. "I don't reckon on seeing heaven."

"But maybe your hell is our heaven," Lucifer said with relish. "Imp," he added.

"Imp?" Starbuck asked, "imp of Satan?"

"The dog! I'm going to call him Imp," Lucifer said delightedly as he ruffled Imp's ears. "Got to get you some meat, Imp." The stumpy tail suddenly wagged as the dog licked Lucifer's face. "I always wanted a dog," Lucifer said again.

"Then keep him safe," Starbuck said, "and keep yourself safe."

"I ain't going to be killed," Lucifer said confidently. "Every corpse here thought that," Starbuck said grimly. Lucifer shook his head. "I ain't," he insisted. "I ate a Yankee grave." "You did what?"

"I found a dead Yankee's grave," Lucifer admitted, "and I waited till midnight, then I ate a scrap of dirt from the grave. No Yankee can kill me now. My mother taught me that."

Starbuck heard something pathetic in the last few words. "Where is your mother, Lucifer?" The boy shrugged. "She's alive," he said reluctantly. "Where?"

The boy jerked his head, then shrugged. "She's alive." He waggled the useless trigger. "But they sold me out. Reckoned I was worth something, see?" He touched his skin. "I ain't real black. If I'd been real black they'd never have sold me, but they reckoned I could be a house slave." He shrugged. "I ran away."