The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (45 page)

General Jackson raged up and down the wood shouting at men to form in company, to find their battalions, to turn and fight. He knew this was the moment for the Yankees to strike. If one Northern corps, even one brigade, should reinforce the Pennsylvanian lodgment about the Dunker church and carry the attack straight on through the woods, then the dizzied men in gray would break. The Yankees would win the day, the rebel army would be turned into a rabble fleeing for a narrow ford, and by winter the streets of Richmond would be filled with strutting Yankees. General Lee, recognizing the same danger, was assembling a line of guns on a ridge to the west of the woods so that if the triumphant Yankees did burst through the trees, they would be met by a killing barrage that might at least slow the pursuers and give his men time to make a fighting retreat toward the Potomac.

But the Yankees were as dazed as the rebels. The swift' ness of the Northern advance had left their units scattered across the field. All of the ground that lay east of the Hagerstown Pike and north of the Dunker church was in Yankee hands, and some Northern units had crossed the Pike to find a dangerous shelter in the edge of the West Woods, but the reinforcements they needed were nowhere in sight. Rebel guns in the south of the battlefield were thras
hing the beaten ground with shel
lfire and rebel infantry was firing from the woods, and so the pursuit stalled as the Yankees, like the rebels, tried to pull order out of chaos.

The rebel panic in the West Woods subsided. Men counted their cartridges and some glanced nervously behind in an effort to spot a route away from the carnage, but as the Northern firing died away the rebels began to reform. One by one the companies were remade, the gaps in the line were mended, and the cartridges replenished.

"I borrowed poor Haxall's watch," Colonel Swynyard joined Starbuck. "He won't need it in heaven, poor man, but I'll send it to his wife."

"He's dead?" Starbuck asked.

Swynyard nodded, then shook the watch and held it to his ear. "It seems to be working," he said dubiously, then looked at the watch's face. "Almost nine o'clock," Swynyard said, and Starbuck immediately frowned and wondered why it was not getting dark. "In the morning, Nate," Swynyard said gently, "in the morning."

The day was still young.

Yankees walked through the East Woods and out into the cornfield. One man vomited at the sight of the field. The stench of the place was worse than a slaughterhouse. Men lay shattered, their blood spilled wide, their bowels open in death. Sightless eyes gazed through smoke, mouths were open and filled with flies. Rebel and Yankee lay together. The wounded called for help, some wept, some called for a merciful shot to the head. A few, pitifully few, stretcher bearers had begun work. A chaplain, overcome by the horror, fell to his knees at the edge of the trees and let tears fall onto an open Bible. Other men moved among the horror in search of plunder; they carried pliers to take gold-capped teeth and knives to cut off wedding ring fingers or else to quiet their victims' protests. A battery of guns checked at the cornfield's edge, the team's drivers unwilling to run their heavy weapons over the field of corpses, but an officer shouted at them to damn their squeamishness and so they cracked their whips and forced the guns across the bodies. Blood turned black. Steam came from the deeper blood pools. The sun was climbing, the very last mist had gone from the creek, and the day's sweltering heat was rising.

Mister Kroeger, the farmer who had undertaken to be the Yankees' guide to the Snaveley Ford, insisted on visiting his farm first. The cows needed milking, but as no orders had come from McClellan ordering an attack across the river, no one thought to hurry the farmer. The Yankee troops detailed to cross the bridge on the lower creek stared from their hiding places and wondered how in the name of a merciful God they were supposed to cross several hundred yards of open land, then cram themselves onto a bridge just twelve feet wide, all the while being raked by the rebels in the rifle pits who waited on the farther bank.

A new and heavier corps of Northern troops forded the river well to the north of the lower bridge. Their crossing was not opposed and the fresh troops began the long climb to the plateau where they would serve to reinforce the Yankees who had beaten the rebels out of the East Woods and the cornfield. Thirteen thousand men climbed the hill, their bands playing and colors flying as they drew nearer and nearer to the death-house stench that waited at the slope's summit. The long lines of advancing men paused and broke apart whenever they reached a rail fence, but once over the fence the long ranks reformed and pushed on. It would take the newcomers some fair time to reach the summit, and once there they would need to be shown where to attack, and all that while the rebels were desperately patching together the northern half of their army and so, for a while, the plateau was eerily silent. Once in a while a gun would fire or a rifle crack, but both sides were drawing breath.

One man, at least, had survived the battle and would fight in it no more. Billy Blythe waited until the sound of firing had died away and until the first excited rush of storming Yankee troops was long gone past his hiding place, and only then did he free himself from the deadweight of the men who-concealed him. The woods were full of curious Yankees, but no one took any particular notice of Billy Blythe in his loose blue coat. He staggered to make himself look like one of the many wounded men waiting for help under the cover of the trees.

He found a dead rebel officer behind a rotting trunk and took the man's belt with its holstered Whitney revolver. Then, still staggering, he made his way east to the Smoketown Road, where a press of vehicles jammed the dirt track and its grass verges. Wagons were bringing new ammunition for the cannons and ambulances were lining up for the wounded. One of the ambulances was carrying the dying body of General Mansfield, who had been shot off his horse as he had tried to urge his men into the East Woods. "Can you walk back?" a sergeant shouted at Blythe.

Blythe mumbled incoherently and lurched more impressively.

"Come on, lad, up with you!" The sergeant boosted Blythe's heavy body onto the bed of an empty ammunition wagon that would trundle north to Smoketown before crossing the creek by the upper bridge.

Blythe lay in the wagon and stared at the sky. He smiled. Caton Rothwell, one of the two men who had sworn to kill him, was dead, shot in the back by Blythe himself, and Blythe had sown enough discord to be fairly sure that Starbuck would be removed before the day was through. He chuckled as he admired his own cleverness. Damn it, he thought, but there were few men to touch Billy Blythe for sheer cunning. He fingered his commission, then struggled
to sit up. A Pennsylvanian Buck
tail officer, wounded in the leg, sat beside him and offered him a cigar. "Hell," the Pennsylvanian said.

"Life is sure sweet," Blythe said.

The Pennsylvanian frowned at Blythe's accent. "Are you a reb?" he asked.

"A major in your army, Captain," Blythe promoted himself to celebrate his survival. "I was never a man to change allegiance to my country, certainly not on account of a pack of Sambos." He accepted the Pennsylvanian's cigar. "Hell," he went on, "I can understand fighting over land or women, but over darkies?" Blythe shook his head. "Just plain don't make sense."

The Captain leaned back on the wagon's sideboard. "Jesus," he said faintly, still shaking after his time in the cornfield.

"Praise His name," Blythe said, "praise His holy name." For Billy Blythe was safe.

Captain Dennison was safe too. He was in the West Woods, where he had found Sergeant Case. The two men were some twenty yards behind the remnants of Starbuck's battalion, where they were concealed in the muddle of disorganized and leaderless men. "Captain Tumlin didn't make it," Dennison said nervously, "leastwise I ain't seen him. And Cartwright's dead. So's Dan Lippincott."

"So the battalion's yours," Case said, and then, after a pause, "or it will be when Starbuck's dead."

Dennison shuddered. He had been scared half to death by the retreat across the open country, a retreat marked by the whistle of minie bullets and the jeers of Yankees and the thump of exploding shells.

"Yours," Case said again, "and you promised to give me back my company. As a captain."

"I did," Dennison agreed.

Case pushed a rifle into Dennison's hands. "It fires true," he said, "and it's loaded."

Dennison stared at the gun as though he had never seen such a thing before. "Swynyard might not confirm me," he said after a while.

"Bloody hell, Captain, we all have to take our chances," Case said, then levered down the trigger guard of his captured Sharps rifle to make sure a round was in the breech. It was. That meant he had three rounds in all, and after they were fired the gun would be useless. Dennison looked up at Starbuck and tentatively raised the rifle to his shoulder, but Case pushed it down. "Not now, Captain," he said scornfully. "Wait till the Yankees come again. Wait till there's plenty of noise."

Dennison nodded. "You're firing too?" he asked, need-ing reassurance.

"Head shot," Case said. "You go for the body," he patted the middle of Dennison's back to show where the nervous Captain should aim. "One of us will get the bastard. Now wait." Case had not been fooled by Starbuck's offer of leniency. He guessed that the Yankee bastard was scared of him and had tried to buy Case off by returning his stripes, but Robert Case was not a man to let a grudge be settled cheaply. Starbuck had humiliated him, and Case wanted his revenge. He also wanted the commission. In a month, he reckoned, he could be commander of the Yellowlegs and then, by God, he would whip the bastards into a disciplined unit. Maybe he could change their name, call them the Virginia Fusiliers, then have the bastards march into battle like they were on Aldershot's parade ground.

The two men crouched low, both waiting for the odd silence on the battlefield to end.

The first Yankee hammer blow had fallen, and under it the rebel line in the north of the battlefield had crumbled. The second blow now climbed steadily up from the middle part of the creek while the third, concealed in the hollows and trees beyond the Antietam, waited for the order that would launch them across the gently flowing stream to cut the rebels' retreat.

On the far side of the Potomac, the marching Light Division heard the sudden lull in the gunfire. Sweating men looked nervously at each other and wondered if the silence meant that the battle was already lost. "Keep going!" the staff officers shouted, "keep going!"

They had miles to march yet and a deep, wide river to cross, but they kept on toward the ominous silence and the pyre of smoke that dirtied a sky above a field of dead.

"seventy-nine men, sir
," Starbuck reported to Swynyard.

"The Legion's down to a hundred and four," Swynyard said bleakly. "Poor Haxall's men don't even make a company. The Sixty-fifth is a hundred and two." He folded the scrap of paper on which the totals had been penciled. "More men will come in," he said, "some are hiding, some are running." Swynyard's Brigade was shrunken small enough to be collected in a half-acre clearing of the West Woods. The Yankees holding the Dunker church were not more than two hundred paces away, but neither side had ammunition to spare and so each was treating the other gingerly. Now and then one of the rebel
skirmishers who ringed the Penn
sylvanians fired, but return fire was rare.

"God knows how many have died," Starbuck said bitterly.

"But your men stood and fought, Nate," Swynyard said, "which is more than the punishment battalion did at Manassas."

"Some stood and fought, sir," Starbuck said, thinking of Dennison. He had not seen the Captain and did not care if he never saw him again. With any luck, Starbuck thought, Dennison was dead or captured, and so, he hoped, was Tumlin.

"You did well," Swynyard insisted. He was watching an ammunition wagon stop on the track that led through the

clearing. The wagon's rifle ammunition was for his brigade, a sign that their fighting was not done this day.

"I did nothing, sir," Starbuck answered, "except chase after my men." The battle had been chaos almost from the first. Men had become detached from their companies, they had fought with whoever they found themselves, and few officers had kept control of their companies. The rebel defense had been made by men just standing and fighting, sometimes without orders, but always with vast pride and a huge determination that had finally been eroded by one heavy attack after another.

"Charmed," Swynyard said sardonically.

"Sir?’
Starbuck asked in puzzlement, then saw that Swynyard was staring at Lieutenant Colonel Maitland, who was strolling along the decimated ranks of the Legion. Maitland was grinning vacuously and spreading lavish compliments, but he was also having some trouble in keeping his footing. His men grinned, amused at the sight of their inebriated commander.

"He's drunk, isn't he?" Swynyard asked.

"He's soberer than he was," Starbuck said. "Much."

Swynyard grimaced. "I watched him in the cornfield. He was strolling through fire like it was the garden of Eden and I thought he must be the bravest man I'd ever seen, but I suppose it wasn't bravery at all. He must have drunk all that liquor he confiscated." 1 guess.

"He was telling me last night," Swynyard went on, "just how scared he was of not doing his duty. I liked him for that. Poor man. I didn't realize how scared he really was."