Copperhead Page 4

  Adam grimaced. “I can’t imagine killing a man with a knife.”

  “It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing,” Starbuck confessed, “but Truslow made me practice on some ration hogs, and it isn’t as hard as you’d think.”

  “Good God,” Adam said faintly. “Hogs?”

  “Only young ones,” Starbuck said. “Incredibly hard to kill, even so. Truslow makes it look easy, but then he makes everything look easy.”

  Adam pondered the idea of practicing the skills of killing as though they were the rudiments of a trade. It seemed tragic. “Couldn’t you have just stunned the poor man?” He asked.

  Starbuck laughed at the question. “I had to make sure of the fellow, didn’t I? Of course I had to! My men’s lives depended on his silence, and you look after your men. That’s the first rule of soldiering.”

  “Did Truslow teach you that too?” Adam asked.

  “No.” Starbuck sounded surprised at the question. “That’s an obvious rule, isn’t it?”

  Adam said nothing. Instead he was thinking, not for the first time, just how unlike each other he and Starbuck were. They had met at Harvard, where they had seemed to recognize in each other the qualities each knew he lacked in himself. Starbuck was impetuous and mercurial, while Adam was thoughtful and painstaking; Starbuck was a slave to his feelings, while Adam tried desperately hard to obey the harsh dictates of a rigorous conscience. Yet out of those dissimilarities had grown a friendship that had endured even the strains that had followed the battle at Manassas. Adam’s father had turned against Starbuck at Manassas, and Starbuck now raised that delicate subject by asking whether Adam thought his father would be given command of a brigade.

  “Joe would like him to get a brigade,” Adam said dubiously. “Joe” was Joseph Johnston, the commander of the Confederate armies in Virginia. “But the President doesn’t listen to Joe much.” Adam went on, “He likes Granny Lee’s opinion better.” General Robert Lee had started the war with an inflated reputation, but had earned the nickname “Granny” after an unsuccessful minor campaign in western Virginia.

  “And Lee doesn’t want your father promoted?” Starbuck asked.

  “So I’m told,” Adam said. “Lee evidently believes Father should go as a commissioner to England”—Adam smiled at the notion—“which Mother thinks is a dandy idea. I think even her illnesses would disappear if she could take tea with the Queen.”

  “But your father wants his brigade?”

  Adam nodded. “And he wants the Legion back,” he said, knowing exactly why his friend had raised the subject. “And if he gets it, Nate, then he’ll demand your resignation. I guess he’s still convinced you shot Ethan.” Adam was referring to the death of the man who would have married Adam’s sister.

  “Ethan was killed by a shell,” Starbuck insisted.

  “Father won’t believe that,” Adam said sadly, “and he won’t be persuaded of it either.”

  “Then I’d better hope your father goes to England and takes tea with the Queen,” Starbuck said carelessly.

  “Because you’re really going to stay with the Legion?” Adam asked, sounding surprised.

  “I like it here. They like me.” Starbuck spoke lightly, disguising the fervid nature of his attachment to the Legion.

  Adam walked a few paces in silence while the gunfire splintered remote, and distant like a skirmish in someone else’s war. “Your brother,” Adam said suddenly, then paused as though he suspected he was trespassing on a difficult area. “Your brother,” he started again, “is still hoping you’ll go back north.”

  “My brother?” Starbuck could not hide his surprise. His elder brother, James, had been captured at Manassas and was now a prisoner in Richmond. Starbuck had sent James gifts of books, but he had not asked for any furlough to visit his brother. He would have found any confrontation with his family too difficult. “You’ve seen him?”

  “Only as part of my duties,” Adam said, and explained that one of his responsibilities was to match lists of captured officers who were to be exchanged between the North and the South. “I sometimes visit the prison in Richmond,” Adam went on, “and saw James there last week.”

  “How is he?”

  “Thin, very pale, but hoping to be released on exchange.”

  “Poor James.” Starbuck could not imagine his worried and pedantic brother as a soldier. James was a very good lawyer, but had always hated uncertainty and adventure, which were the very things that compensated for the dangerous discomforts of soldiering.

  “He worries about you,” Adam said.

  “I worry about him,” Starbuck said lightly, hoping to deflect what he suspected was an imminent sermon from his friend.

  “He’ll certainly be pleased to hear you’re attending prayer meetings,” Adam said fervently. “He worries for your faith. Do you go to church every week?”

  “Whenever I can,” Starbuck said, then decided this was a subject best changed. “And you?” he asked Adam. “How are you?”

  Adam smiled, but did not answer at once. Instead he blushed, then laughed. He was clearly full of some piece of news that he was too embarrassed to tell outright, but nevertheless wanted prised out of him. “I’m really fine,” he said, leaving the opening dangling.

  Starbuck caught the inflection exactly. “You’re in love.”

  Adam nodded. “I really think I might be, yes.” He sounded surprised at himself. “Yes. Really.”

  Adam’s coyness filled Starbuck with affectionate amusement. “You’re getting married?”

  “I think so, yes. We think so, indeed, but not yet. We thought we should wait for the war’s end.” Adam still blushed, but suddenly he laughed, hugely pleased with himself, and unbuttoned a tunic pocket as though to take out a picture of his beloved. “You haven’t even asked what her name is.”

  “Tell me her name,” Starbuck demanded dutifully, then turned away because the sound of rifle fire had swollen again to a frantic intensity. A slight haze of powder smoke was showing above the trees now, a gauzy flag of battle that would thicken into a dense fog if the guns kept up their present rate of fire.

  “She’s called…” Adam began, then checked because hooves thumped loud on the turf behind him.

  “Sir! Mr. Starbuck, sir!” a voice hailed, and Starbuck turned to see young Robert Decker galloping across the field on the back of Adam’s stallion. “Sir!” He was waving excitedly to Starbuck. “We’ve got orders, sir! We’ve got orders! We’re to go and fight them, sir!”

  “Thank God,” Starbuck said, and started running back to his company.

  “Her name’s Julia,” Adam said to no one, frowning at his friend’s back. “Her name’s Julia.”

  “Sir?” Robert Decker asked, puzzled. He had slid out of the saddle and now offered the stallion’s reins to Adam.

  “Nothing, Robert.” Adam took the reins. “Nothing at all. Go and join the company.” He watched Nate shouting at K Company, seeing the excitement of men stirred from repose by the prospect of killing. Then he buttoned his pocket to secure the leather-cased photograph of his girl before climbing into the saddle and riding to join his father’s Legion. Which was about to fight its second battle.

  On the quiet banks of the Potomac.

  The two Yankee river crossings were five miles apart and General Nathan Evans had been trying to decide which offered his brigade the greater danger. The crossing to the east had cut the turnpike and so appeared to be the bigger tactical threat because it severed his communications with Johnston’s headquarters at Centreville, but the Yankees were not reinforcing the handful of men and guns they had thrown over the river there, while more and more reports spoke of infantry reinforcements crossing the river at Harrison’s Island and then climbing the precipitous slope to the wooded summit of Ball’s Bluff. It was there, Evans decided, that the enemy was concentrating its threat, and it was there that he now sent the rest of his Mississippians and his two Virginia regiments. He sent the 8th Virginians to the
near side of Ball’s Bluff, but ordered Bird to make for the farther western flank. “Go through the town,” Evans told Bird, “and come up on the left of the Mississippi boys. Then get rid of the Yankee bastards.”

  “With pleasure, sir.” Bird turned away and shouted his orders. The men’s packs and blanket rolls were to be left with a small baggage guard, while every one else in the Legion was to march west with a rifle, sixty rounds of ammunition, and whatever other weapons they chose to carry. In the summer, when they had first marched to war, the men had been weighed down with knapsacks and haversacks, canteens and cartridge boxes, blankets and groundsheets, bowie knives and revolvers, bayonets and rifles, plus whatever other accoutrements a man’s family might have sent to keep him safe, warm, or dry. Some men had carried buffalo robes, while one or two had even worn metal breastplates designed to protect them from Yankee bullets, but now few men carried anything more than a rifle and bayonet, a canteen, a haversack, and a groundsheet and blanket rolled into a tube that was worn slantwise around their chests. Everything else was just impediment. Most had discarded their pasteboard-stiffened caps, preferring slouch hats that protected the backs of their necks from the sun. Their tall stiff boots had been cut down into shoes, the fine twin rows of brass buttons on their long jackets had been chopped away and used as payment for apple juice or sweet milk from the farms of Loudoun County, while many of the skirts of the long coats had been cut away to provide material to patch breeches or elbows. Back in June, when the Legion had trained at Faulconer Court House, the regiment had looked as smart and well-equipped as any soldiers in the world, but now, after just one battle and three months picket duty along the frontier, they looked like ragamuffins, but they were all far better soldiers. They were lean, tanned, fit, and very dangerous. “They still have their illusions, you see,” Thaddeus Bird explained to his nephew. Adam was riding his fine roan horse while Major Bird, as ever, walked.

  “Illusions?”

  “We think we’re invincible because we’re young. Not me, you understand, but the boys. I used to make it my business to educate the more stupid fallacies out of youth; now I try to preserve their nonsense.” Bird raised his voice so that the nearest company could hear him. “You’ll live forever, you rogues, as long as you remember one thing! Which is?”

  There was a pause, then a handful of men returned a ragged answer. “Aim low.”

  “Louder!”

  “Aim low!” This time the whole company roared back the answer, then began laughing, and Bird beamed on them like a schoolmaster proud of his pupils’ achievements.

  The Legion marched through the dusty main street of Leesburg where one small crowd of men was gathered outside the Loudoun County Court House and another, slightly larger, outside Makepeace’s Tavern across the street. “Give us guns!” one man shouted. It appeared they were the county militia and had neither weapons nor ammunition, though a handful of men, privately equipped, had gone to the battlefield anyway. Some of the men fell in with the Legion, hoping to find a discarded weapon on the field. “What’s happening, Colonel?” they asked Adam, mistaking the scarlet trim and gold stars on his fine uniform as evidence that he commanded the regiment.

  “It’s nothing to be excited about,” Adam insisted. “Nothing but a few stray northerners.”

  “Making enough noise, ain’t they?” a woman called, and the Yankees were indeed much noisier now that Senator Baker had succeeded in getting his three guns across the river and up the steep, slippery path to the bluffs peak, where the gunners had cleared their weapons’ throats with three blasts of canister that had rattled into the trees to shred the leaves.

  Baker, taking command of the battle, had found his troops sadly scattered. The 20th Massachusetts was posted in the woods at the summit while the 15th had pushed across the ragged meadow, through the far woods and into the open slopes overlooking Leesburg. Baker called the 15th back, insisting that they form a battle line on the left of the 20th. “We’ll form up here,” he announced, “while New York and California join us!” He drew his sword and whipped the engraved blade to slash off a nettle’s head. The rebel bullets slashed overhead, occasionally clipping off shreds of leaf that fluttered down in the warm, balmy air. The bullets seemed to whistle in the woods, and somehow that odd noise took away their danger. The Senator, who had fought as a volunteer in the Mexican War, felt no apprehension; indeed he felt the exhilaration of a man touched by the opportunity for greatness. This would be his day! He turned as Colonel Milton Cogswell, commander of the Tammany Regiment, panted up to the bluff’s summit. “‘One blast upon your bugle horn is worth a thousand men!’” Baker greeted the sweating Colonel with a jocular quotation.

  “I’ll take the goddamn men, sir, begging your pardon,” Cogswell said sourly, then flinched as a pair of bullets slapped through the leaves above his head. “What are our intentions, sir?”

  “Our intentions, Milton? Our intentions are victory, fame, glory, peace, forgiveness of our enemies, reconciliation, magnanimity, prosperity, happiness, and the assured promise of heaven’s reward.”

  “Then might I suggest, sir,” Cogswell said, trying to sober the ebullient Senator, “that we advance and occupy that stand of trees?” He gestured at the woods beyond the patch of ragged meadowland. By pulling the 20th Massachusetts out of those woods Baker had effectively yielded the trees to the rebels, and already the first gray-coated infantry were well-established among the undergrowth.

  “Those rogues won’t bother us,” Baker said dismissively. “Our artillerymen will soon scour them loose. We’ll only be here a moment or two, just long enough to assemble, and then we’ll advance. On to glory!”

  A bullet whipsawed close above both men, causing Cogswell to curse in angry astonishment. His anger arose not from the near miss, but because the shot had come from a high knoll on the eastern end of the bluffs. The knoll was the highest part of the bluff and dominated the trees where the northern troops were gathering. “Aren’t we occupying that height?” Cogswell asked Baker in horror.

  “No need! No need! We’ll be advancing soon! On to victory!” Baker strolled away, blithe in his self-assurance. Tucked inside the sweatband of his hat, where he had once stuffed his legal notes before going into court, he had pushed the orders he had received from General Stone. “Colonel,” the order read in a hurried scribble, “in case of heavy firing in front of Harrison’s Island, you will advance the California regiment of your brigade or retire the regiments under Colonels Lee and Devens upon the Virginia side of the river, at your discretion, assuming command on arrival.” All of which, in Baker’s view, meant very little, except that he was in command, the day was sunny, the enemy lay before him, and martial fame was in his grasp. “‘One blast upon your bugle horn,’” the Senator chanted the lines from Sir Walter Scott as he marched through the northern troops gathering under the trees, “‘were worth a thousand men!’ Fire back, lads! Let the rascals know we’re here! Fire away, boys! Give them fire! Let them know the North is here to fight!”

  Lieutenant Wendell Holmes took off his gray greatcoat, folded it carefully, then placed it beneath a tree. He drew his revolver, checked that its percussion caps were properly in place over the cones, then fired at the far, shadowy shapes of the rebels. The Senator’s fine voice still echoed through the woods, punctuated by the crack and cough of Holmes’s revolver. “‘Hail to the chief,’” Holmes quietly spoke the line from the same poem Baker was declaiming, “‘who in triumph advances.’”

  Senator Baker pulled out an expensive watch that had been a gift from his associates and friends of the California bar on the occasion of his appointment to the U.S. Senate. The day was hurrying by, and if he wanted to capture and consolidate Leesburg before nightfall he would need to hurry. “Forward now!” Baker pushed the watch back into his fob pocket. “All of you! All of you! On, my fine boys, on! On to Richmond! On to glory! All for the union, boys, all for the union!”

  The colors were lifted, the glorious Stars and Str
ipes, and beside them the white silk colors of Massachusetts with the arms of the Commonwealth embroidered on one flank and the motto Fide et Constantia stitched bright on the other. The silk streamed in the sunlight as the men cheered, broke cover, and charged.

  To die.

  “Fire!” Two whole regiments of Mississippi men were in the trees now, and their rifles whipped flames across the clearing to where the northerners had suddenly appeared. Bullets splintered the locust trees and shredded the bright yellow leaves of the maples. A dozen northerners went down in the volley. One, a man who had never sworn in his life, began cursing. A Boston furniture maker stared astonished at the blood spreading on his uniform, then called for his mother as he tried to crawl back to cover.

  “Fire!” Colonel Eps of the 8th Virginia had the high ground that dominated the Yankees’ eastern flank and his riflemen poured a slaughtering fusillade down onto the northerners. So many bullets whined and sang off the bronze barrels of the Yankee howitzers that the gunners fled down the precipice of the bluff to where they were safe from the hornets’ whine and hissing slash of the rebel bullets.

  “Fire!” More Mississippians opened fire. They lay flat among the trees, or knelt behind trunks and peered through the powder smoke to see that their volleys had sent the northern attack reeling back. Scattered among the Mississippians were men from Leesburg and from the surrounding farms who fired fowling pieces and shotguns at the faltering Yankees. A New York sergeant cursed at his men in Gaelic, but the curses did no good and a bullet shattered his elbow. The northerners were retreating back into the trees, seeking shelter behind trunks and fallen logs where they reloaded their muskets and rifles. Two of the Massachusetts companies had been recruited from German immigrants, and their officers shouted in that language, exhorting them to show the world how Germans could fight. Other northern officers feigned indifference to the storm of bullets that whipped and hissed across the bluffs crest. They strolled among the trees, knowing that a display of insouciant bravery was the quality necessary for rank. They paid for the display with blood. Many of the men from the 20th Massachusetts had hung their fine new scarlet-lined coats from branches and the garments twitched as the bullets plucked and tore at the rich gray cloth. The sound of the battle was constant now, like calico tearing or a canebreak burning, but under that splintering crackle came the sobbing of wounded men and the screams of hurt men and the rattle of dying men.