The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (48 page)

The idea came to him then, but he was so befuddled and tired that it took some few seconds for him to realize that the idea could work, then more seconds while he debated whether he had the energy to make the necessary effort. The temptation was to do as little as possible. His men had fought beyond the expectations of anyone in the army and no one could blame them now for letting other men do the dying and fighting, but the appeal of the idea was irresistible. He twisted and saw Lucifer crouching with his dog. "I want the officers here," he told the boy, "all except Mister Potter."

The boy darted away through the brush while Starbuck turned back to stare at the nearest gun. It was a Napoleon, the French-designed cannon that was the workhorse for both armies. Its flared muzzle could fire a twelve-pound roundshot, canister, shell, or case shot, but it was the canister that the infantry feared most. The Napoleon might not have the range and power of the big rifled cannon, but its smoothbore barrel spat canister in a regular, killing pattern where the larger rifled guns could skew the shower of lead into strange shapes that sometimes flew safely overhead. The Napoleon, so far as the infantry was concerned, was a giant shotgun mounted on massive wheels.

The Yankee gunners were relaxed, plainly unaware that enemy infantry was close. A faded Stars and Stripes hung on the limber, which stood with its lid open. A shirt-sleeved man carried ammunition and stacked it close to the gun, where another man leaned on the barrel and cleaned his fingernails with a knife. Every now and then he glanced over his right shoulder toward the east as if he expected to see reinforcements coming, but all he saw were his gun's horses cropping the pasture's bloodied grass a hundred yards away. After a time he yawned, folded the knife, and fanned his face with his hat.

Dennison and Peel joined Starbuck. These, with Potter, were his only captains. After the battle, Starbuck thought, there would needs be wholesale promotions, but that could wait. Now he told the two men what he wanted, cut short their anxieties, and sent them away. A minute later their shrunken companies came to the tree line, where Starbuck concealed the men in the shadows and thick brush. He walked behind the line of men telling them what he expected of them. "You don't fire till the gun has fired," he said, "then you kill the gunners. Then you charge. One shot up your barrel, bayonets on, don't stop to reload." An excitement touched Starbuck's voice and communicated itself to the men who, tired as they were, grinned at him. "They say we're no good, lads," Starbuck told them, "they say we're the Yellowlegs. Well, we're about to give the army a present of one gun. Maybe two. Remember, one shot only, don't fire till the cannon's fired, then charge like there was a score of naked whores serving that gun."

"Wish there were," a man said.

There was a sudden crashing in the timber behind
Starbuck
, who turned to see the drunken Colonel Maitland, who had somehow recovered his horse and now rode with drawn sword toward Starbuck's battalion. "I'll lead you, boys!" Maitland shouted. "Victory all the way! Up now! Get ready."

Starbuck grabbed the bridle before Maitland had a chance to roust the men to a premature attack. He dragged the horse round, pointed it toward the heart of the woods, and slapped its rump. Maitland somehow kept his seat as he rode away shouting and brandishing the sword. The noise he made was drowned by the furious sound of the fighting further south. "Wait, lads," Starbuck calmed his men, "just wait."

Sergeant Case stared at the unsuspecting gunners. He was tempted to fire at them as soon as the attack on the Dunker church opened, and so deny Starbuck his victory by alerting the gunners to their danger, but Case only had two bullets left for his Sharps rifle and he dared not waste one. His hatred of Starbuck was being fed by what he perceived as Starbuck's unprofessionalism. Soon, Case reckoned, the battalion would be so shrunken that it would cease to exist, and what of Dennison's promise then? Case wanted to be an officer, he wanted to command the Yellowlegs, whom he planned to drill and discipline into the finest battalion in the Confederate army, but now Starbuck was threatening to thin its emaciated ranks even further. It was amateurism, the Sergeant thought, sheer bloody amateurism.

A cheer sounded in the woods, then the rebel yell erupted. Swynyard's voice shouted out of the shadows. "Go, Nate! Go!"

"Wait!" Starbuck shouted at his men. "Just wait!"

A splinter of rifle fire met the rebel charge, then a louder volley sounded as the charging rebels fired at the Yankees. The gunners had sprung to life. The barrel of the nearest gun was aimed roughly where Starbuck's skirmishers were placed and Starbuck prayed it was not charged with canister. He watched the gun captain duck aside and yank the lanyard that scraped the friction primer across the tube. The gun bucked violently back, spitting its flame and smoke toward the trees.

"Fire!" Starbuck shouted. Dimly over the crack of his rifles he heard the clatter of bullets striking the cannon. He hauled out his revolver. "Now charge!"

He ran from the trees and could see that the gunners had been hit hard. The gun captain was on his knees, holding his belly with one hand and the gun's wheel with another. Two other men were down while the rest of the crew hesitated between reloading and looking for the danger.

The Yellowlegs charged. The gun lay beyond the junction of the turnpike and the Smoketown Road and the remnants of two sets of fences lay in their path, but the men leaped the rails and stumbled on as fast as their tired legs would carry them. It was a race now between the weary infantrymen and the hard-hit gun crew, who began trying to handspike the Napoleon round to face the attack. A wounded gunner was holding a charge of canister, ready to plunge it down the barrel, then he saw the race was lost and he just dropped the charge and fled toward the east, his suspenders flapping about his legs as he limped away.

The second gun tried to save the first, but before its gunners could charge the barrel and turn the gun, the defenders of the Dunker church gave way. They had been attacked from two sides, caught in a screaming vice of vengeful gray, and the thousand Yankees under General Greene had taken enough. They scattered and fled, and the gunners of the second Napoleon simply brought up their horses, limbered up the gun, and galloped away. Starbuck's men, still screaming their challenge, pounced on the first gun, slapping its hot barrel and shouting their victory while, just yards away, the broken Yankees streamed past, pursued by rifle fire from the woods.
Starbuck
's men watched them go, too tired to make an effort to interfere. A wounded gunner begged for water and one of Starbuck's men knelt beside the man and tipped a canteen to his lips. "Never knew you boys were there," the gunner said. He struggled to sit up and managed at last to prop himself against his gun's wheel. "They said it only was all our boys in the trees." He sighed, then felt in his pocket to bring out a wrapped tintype of a woman that he set on his lap. He stared at the image.

"We'll find you a doctor," Starbuck promised.

The man looked up at Starbuck briefly, then stared again at the tintype. "Too late for doctors," he said. "One of you boys put a bullet in my guts. Don't hurt much, not yet, but there isn't a doctor born who can help. If I was a dog you'd have put me down by now." He gave the portrait a gentle touch. "Prettiest girl in Fitchburg," he said softly, "and we've only been married two months." He paused, closed his eyes as a spasm of pain flickered deep in his guts, then looked up at Starbuck. "Where you boys from?" he asked.

"Virginia."

"That's her name," the gunner said, "Virginia Simmons."

Starbuck crouched beside the man. "She is pretty," he said. The photograph showed a slender, fair-haired girl with an anxious face. "And I reckon you'll see her again," he added.

"Not this side of the pearly gates," the gunner said. He had grown a wispy brown beard in an evident attempt to make himself look older. He glanced at the revolver in Starbuck's hand, then up into Starbuck's eyes. "You an officer?"

"Yes."

"You reckon there's a heaven?" Starbuck paused, struck by the intensity of the question. "Yes," he said gently, "I know there is." "Me, too," the gunner said.

" 'I know that my Redeemer liveth,'" Starbuck quoted. The gunner nodded, then looked back at his wife. "And

I'll be waiting for you, girl," he said, "with coffee on the boil." He smiled. "She always likes her coffee scalding hot." A tear showed in his eye. "Never knew you boys were there," he said in a weaker voice.

Some of the rebels had pursued the broken Yankees out into the pastureland, but a barrage of canister drove them back. One musket ball struck the barrel of the captured cannon and Starbuck ordered his men back to the trees. He stooped to the wounded gunner to see if the man wanted to be carried back, but the man was already dead. His lap was puddled with blood, his eyes were wide open, and a fly was crawling into his mouth. Starbuck left him.

Back at the tree line some of his men put their heads on their arms and slept. Others stared sightlessly east where the gunsmoke lay like a sea-fog, while in the corn, the pastures, and the ravaged woods, the wounded cried on unheeded.

The heat of the battle had moved south, leaving the scene of the morning's fighting full of exhausted survivors too weak to fight more. Now it was the sunken road that acted like a giant meat grinder. Battalion after battalion walked into the rebel fire, and battalion after battalion died on the open ground, and still more men came from the east to add their deaths to the day's rich toll.

But the rebels were dying as well. The road might be a defender's dream, but it had one shortcoming. It ran directly eastward from the Hagerstown Pike, then bent sharply south and east so that once the Yankees had managed to place a battery on a line directly east of the road's first stretch, they were ab
le to enfilade the stubborn Con
federate defenders. Shells plunged into the sunken road and the steep banks magnified the carnage of each explosion. The fire of the defenders grew weaker, yet still they drove back one attack after another. The Irishmen of New York nearly broke through. They had been told that the Confederates were the friends of the British and that was incentive enough to drive the green flags forward. The flags had golden Irish harps embroidered on the green and the Irishmen carried the harps further forward than any flag had yet reached, but there was no bravery sufficient to carry men through the last few murderous yards of fire. One black-bearded giant of a man screamed his war cry in Gaelic and urged his compatriots on as though he could win the war and avenge his people single-handed, but a rebel's bullet put the man down, and the charge, like so many others, was finally shredded into raw and bloody tatters by the remorseless rifle fire. The Irish made a new line of bodies, closer than any others to the lane's fiery lip, while in the lane itself, where the shells plunged to tear dead bodies into mincemeat, the rebel dead thickened.

Other men died on the lower creek, where every effort to take the Rohrbach Bridge had failed. The corpses lay like a barrier on the east bank and the very sight of so many dead served as a deterrent to the waiting Yankee battalions, who knew their turn must come to assault the deadly passage. Thorne came there too, and came with the authority of his enemy McClellan. He found General Burnside on the hill overlooking the bridge. "Where the hell are the guns?" Thorne snarled.

General Burnside, astonished at being addressed in such a peremptory fashion, sounded defensive. "Waiting to cross," he explained, gesturing toward a lane behind the hill where the guns were sheltering.

"You need them up here," Thorne insisted.

"But there are no roads," an aide protested.

"Then make a road!" Thorne shouted. "Get a thousand men if you have to, but drag the damn things up here. Now! Two guns, twelve-pounders, canister and case shot only. And for Christ's sake, hurry!"

South of the Potomac, marching in swirls of dust under the merciless sun, the Light Division was also being chivvied and harried to keep moving, to keep moving, always to keep moving toward the sound of the killing.

While on the Pry house lawn General McClellan enjoyed his lunch.

two napoleons were
fetched to the summit of the hill above the Rohrbach Bridge and their presence turned the battle for the crossing. The very first blast of canister whipped a half-dozen sharpshooters out of their hiding places in the tops of the trees on the western bank, and left others dangling lifelessly from the ropes that had held them safe to the branches. The second and third discharges of canister decimated the rebel defenders in their rifle pits.

A Pennsylvania battalion, promised a keg of whiskey if they took the bridge, charged forward. There were still enough rebels to kill the leading ranks, but the men behind leaped over their dead and stormed onto the stone roadway that arched across the creek. More Yankees followed, jostling between the balustrades as they hurried to carry their revenge to the rebels, who scrambled hurriedly out of their pits and up over the hill.

Downstream, at Snaveley's Ford, another brigade at last made the crossing to the western bank and the Yankees were finally loose in Lee's rear, but it was one thing to be across the creek and quite another to form the battalions and brigades into their columns. Guns had to be fetched over the creek, disarray had to be straightened, and the ground had to be reconnoitered. Thorne cursed McClellan for keeping the army's cavalry at headquarters where it served no purpose. If the cavalry could have been