Battle Flag. Bernard Cornwell
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there!” Swynyard called, pointing to a spot close behind his horse; then he turned in his saddle to stare northward through a pair of binoculars. Captain Moxey was fussily ordering H Company to align themselves on his marker, so Starbuck left him to it and walked forward to join Swynyard. The Colonel lowered his glasses to watch the battery of rebel six-pounders that was deployed just a hundred yards ahead. The smoke from the small guns was obscuring the fighting beyond, but every now and then a Yankee shell would explode near the battery, making Swynyard grin in appreciation. “Oh, well done! Good shooting!” Swynyard called aloud when an enemy shell eviscerated a team horse picketed fifty paces behind the guns. The horse screamed as it flailed bloodily on the ground, panicking the other tethered horses, which reared frantically as they tried to drag their iron picket stakes out of the ground. “Chaos!” Swynyard said happily, then glanced down at Starbuck. “Yankees are damned lively this afternoon.”
“Guess they were waiting for us,” Starbuck said. “Knew we were coming.”
“Guess someone told on us. A traitor, eh?” Swynyard offered the suggestion slyly. The Colonel was a man of startling ugliness, much of it the result of wounds honorably taken in the service of the old United States, but some of it caused by the whiskey that generally left him comatose by early evening. He had a coarse black beard streaked with gray and crusted with dried tobacco juice, sunken eyes, and a tic in his scarred right cheek. His left hand was missing three fingers, and his mouth was filled with rotting, stinking teeth. “Maybe the traitor was a Northerner, eh?” Swynyard hinted clumsily.
Starbuck smiled. “More likely to be some poor drunken son of a bitch needing cash for his whiskey…”—he paused—“Colonel.”
Swynyard’s only response was his cackling laugh, which hinted at madness. Remarkably, despite the lateness of the day, he was still sober, either because Washington Faulconer had hidden his whiskey or else because Swynyard’s small remaining shred of self-protection had convinced him that he had to function efficiently on a day of battle or else lose his job altogether. Swynyard glanced up at the gunsmoke, then looked back to the notebook in which he was writing. On his right sleeve he wore a square patch of white cloth embroidered with a red crescent. The symbol was from Washington Faulconer’s coat of arms, and the General had dreamed up the happy idea of issuing the badges to every man in his Brigade, though the idea had not been wholly successful. Some men refused to wear the patch, and generally it was possible to tell Faulconer’s supporters from his detractors by the badge’s presence or absence. Starbuck, naturally, had never worn the crescent badge, though some of his men had patched their pants’ seats with the convenient square of cloth.
Swynyard tore the page out of his notebook, put the book itself away, and then drew out his revolver. He began slipping percussion caps over the firing nipples of the loaded chambers. The barrel of the gun was pointed directly at Starbuck’s chest. “I could have an accident,” Swynyard said slyly. “No one could blame me. I’m three fingers short of a hand so no wonder I fumble sometimes. One shot, Starbuck, and you’d be buzzard meat on the grass. I reckon General Faulconer would like that.” Swynyard began to thumb the hammer back.
Then a click sounded behind Starbuck, and the Colonel’s thumb relaxed. Sergeant Truslow lowered the hammer of his rifle. “I can have an accident, too,” Truslow said.
Swynyard said nothing but just grinned and turned away. The nearby battery had ceased firing, and the gunners were hitching their weapons to limbers. The smoke of the battery dissipated slowly in the still air. The rebel guns had been fighting a duel with a Northern battery, a duel that the Northerners had won. “The Yankees will be raising their sights,” Swynyard remarked, staring through his glasses. “They’ve got four-and-a-half-inch rifles. Can’t fight four-and-a-half-inch rifles with six-pounder guns. We might as well throw rocks at the bastards.”
Starbuck watched the Southern guns wheel fast away to the rear and wondered if he was now supposed to fight four-and-a-half-inch rifled cannon with rifles. His heart seemed to be beating too loudly, filling his chest with its drumbeats. He tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was too dry.
The sound of musketry slackened, to be replaced by Northern cheers. Yankee cheering was much deeper in tone than the blood-chilling yelp of attacking rebels. The cannon smoke had thinned sufficiently to let Starbuck see a belt of woodland a half-mile ahead, and then to see a sight he had never dreamed of witnessing on one of Thomas Jackson’s battlefields.
He saw panic.
Ahead and to the left of Starbuck a horde of Southern soldiers were pouring out of the woodland and fleeing southward across the shallow valley. All discipline was gone. Shells exploded among the gray-jacketed soldiers, adding to their desperation. A rebel flag went down, was snatched up again, then disappeared in another flame-filled burst of shell smoke. Horsemen were galloping through the fleeing mass in an attempt to turn the men around, and here and there among the panic a few men did try to form a line, but such small groups stood no chance against the flood of fear that swept the majority away.
Swynyard might be a drunkard and a foul-tempered brute, but he had been a professional soldier long enough to recognize disaster. He turned to see that Captain Medlicott’s G Company had formed alongside Starbuck’s men. “Medlicott!” Swynyard shouted. “Take these two companies forward! You’re in charge!” Medlicott, though much older than Starbuck, had less seniority as a captain, but Swynyard had given him the command of the two companies as a way of insulting Starbuck. “See that broken limber?” The Colonel pointed toward a shattered vehicle that lay two hundred paces ahead, where a strip of grass marked a divide between a patch of harvested corn and a wider field of wheat. “Form your skirmish line there! I’ll bring the Legion up in support.” Swynyard turned back to Starbuck. “Take this,” he said and leaned down from the saddle to hold out a folded scrap of paper.
Starbuck snatched the piece of paper, then shouted at his men to advance alongside G Company. A shell screamed overhead. It was odd, Starbuck thought, how the debilitating nervousness that afflicted a man before battle could be banished by the proximity of danger. Even the day’s stifling heat seemed bearable now that he was under fire. He licked his lips, then unfolded the scrap of paper that Swynyard had given him. He had supposed it would be written orders, but instead he saw it was a label for a dead man. Starbuck, the paper read, Boston, Massachusetts. Starbuck threw it angrily away. Behind, where the rest of the Legion hurried into ranks, Swynyard saw the gesture and cackled.
“This is madness!” Truslow protested to Starbuck. Two companies of skirmishers could not stand against the tide of fear that was retreating from the Yankee guns.
“The rest of the Legion will help,” Starbuck said.
“They’d better,” Truslow said, “or we’re vulture meat.”
Company G was advancing to Starbuck’s right. Medlicott seemed unworried by the odds, but just stumped ahead of his men with a rifle in his hands. Or maybe, Starbuck thought, the miller just did not display his fear. “Keep the ranks straight!” Starbuck called to Coffman. “I want them steady.” He felt in his pocket and found the stub of a cigar he had been saving for battle. He borrowed a lit cigar from a man in the ranks, lit his own, and drew the bitter smoke deep into his lungs.
Lieutenant Coffman had drawn ahead of H Company and was holding a brass-handled bayonet like a sword.
“Get back, Mr. Coffman!” Starbuck called.
“But, sir—”
“Your place is behind the company, Lieutenant! Go there! And throw away that toy sword!”
The first Northern soldiers suddenly appeared at the tree line on the valley’s far crest, which blossomed with the small puffs of white rifle smoke. A shell exploded ahead of Starbuck, and pieces of its casing whipped past him. To his left the field had been partly harvested, so that some of the wheat was standing but most was drying in stooks. Small fires flickered where the shell fire had set the dry crops alight. There were patches of corn stubble among the wheat and two rows of standing corn, where a group of rebel soldiers had taken cover. The tasseled corn shivered whenever a bullet or shell whipped through the stalks. A Northern flag appeared at