The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (49 page)

unleashed here, behind the rebel army, he could have struck panic into Lee's men, but the Northern cavalry was two miles away and General Burnside would not advance his infantry until all was ready. A handful of rebel skirmishers harried the Northerners as they laboriously marched unit after unit across the river. Thorne raged at Burnside for speed, but Burnside would not be hurried. "The day's young yet," he said, indicating the brevity of the shadows, "and there's no need for impetuosity. We shall do it properly. Besides," Burnside went on as though his next point was irrefutable, "we can't attack till the infantry is resupplied with ammunition. Their pouches are empty, Thorne, empty. Men can't fight with empty pouches."

Thorne wondered how any general could have failed to carry sufficient ammunition for a day's hard fighting, but he bit back the comment. The day was indeed young, and it needed to be, for Burnside's units were crossing the bridge at a snail's pace and, once over the river, they lingered aimlessly until staff officers arrived to direct them to their proper places. Burnside's advance, when it came, would be a slow, grinding assault instead of a lightning strike, and Thorne could only pray that Lee did not choose to retreat before the North's trap swung ponderously shut. He forced his horse up the steep hill where the rebel defenders had fought for so long and, once at the summit, he stared across an empty landscape of cornfields, shade trees, and pastureland, and, in the heat-hazed distance where it was marked by the dust kicked up by a trail of ambulances going slowly south toward the river, he could see the enemy's only route home. A rebel skirmisher fired at Thorne and the bullet whipped close beside his ear. Thorne saw the patch of smoke and reckoned the shot had been all of four hundred yards. He raised his hat in ironic salute to a well-aimed near miss, then turned his horse down from the high ground.

The sunken lane at last fell. The Yankees, capturing the road, found they could not cross the track without stepping on the bodies of its defenders, and though those defenders had failed, they had hurt their attackers so hard that the Yankees were in no fit state to advance further.

The battle, which had burned so fierce, smoldered in the afternoon. Weary men staggered about the plateau that was hung with smoke and smothered with the foul miasma of bodies beginning to rot in the hot sun. Batteries waited for new ammunition, infantry counted their cartridges, and officers counted their men. Units that had started the day five hundred strong were less than a hundred now. The dead possessed the field, while the living searched for water and peered into the eye-stinging smoke for a sign of the enemy.

The rebels were hardest hit. There were no reserves left, not one man, and so Lee made a barrier of artillery to defend Sharpsburg and its single road, which led back to the Confederacy. The guns were just in place when a weary messenger on a tired, dust-stained, and sweat-whitened horse came up the track from the town. Hill's Light Division had reached the ford. The Confederacy's last troops were crossing the river and coming north.

The rest of Lee's army waited. They knew the mauled Yankees were making ready and that soon the blue ranks would appear over the brow of the plateau and the fighting would begin again. The dead who had been searched for ammunition were searched again and the precious cartridges shared out. There was no hot water to clean out the fouled barrels of the rifles, nor any urine, for the men were parched dry by thirst and sweat. They waited.

The spring that would drive the Yankees' trap shut was coiling itself tight as Burnside's men slowly readied themselves for the advance, but General McClellan could not shake the northern part of the battlefield from his fears. It was from that northern sector, which had been harrowed by death all morning, that he expected the great rebel counterattack that would jeopardize his army's existence. One of his generals reported imminent disaster in those northern fields, while another claimed that with one more effort the North could sweep the rebels out of the West Woods and back through Sharpsburg altogether, and so fierce was their argument that once his lunch was taken McClellan crossed the creek for the first and only time that day. He met his generals, he listened to their arguments, and then he pronounced his verdict. Caution, he declared, was best. The generals must hold their ground against the worst the rebels could throw against them, but they were to make no more attacks. The enemy, he said, must not be provoked and then, with that decided, McClellan went back to his armchair, from where he sought reassurance that his heavy reserve of men was still in place to meet the rebel attack he knew must be coming. After all, as he explained to Pinkerton, the rebels did outnumber him.

"That they do, chief, that they do," Pinkerton agreed enthusiastically. "Hordes of the scoundrels, just hordes!" The Scotsman blew his nose vigorously, then unfolded the handkerchief to inspect the result. "It's a miracle we've done as well as we have, chief," he opined, still staring at the handkerchief. "Nothing short of a miracle."

McClellan, who rather thought it was his superior generalship that had staved off disaster all day, grunted, then stooped to the telescope to watch as the troops in the center of the field at last began their advance from the sunken lane. Their job was to hold Lee's men in

Sharpsburg while Burnside cut behind them. It was a grand sight, McClellan thought. Thousands of men marched beneath their flags. Wisps of smoke drifted across the telescope's lens, giving the great attack a fine romantic flavor.

It was less romantic in the ranks. There, advancing across open fields toward the massive gun line assembled on the hill above the village, the North suffered as the smoldering battle burst again into livid flame. The cannons' long range meant the infantry had no chance of replying, but could only trudge through the smoke of the explosions and across the blood of their comrades until it was their turn to be hit. Ahead of them was the skyline above the village, but that skyline was rimmed by guns that pumped tongues of flame and billows of smoke. The shells screamed and wailed and cracked and killed, while from beyond the creek the heavy Federal guns returned the fire with big shells that rumbled in the sky to flower in bloody gouts on the rebel artillery line.

Burnside's men started forward at last. There, and only there on all the battlefield, a band played as the flags were carried up the hill to begin the grand attack that would cut the retreat of the rebel army.

For at last the Northern trap was swinging shut and the long day's killing was coming to its climax.

The Yankees in the North and East Woods were quiet, but the northern flank of the Federal advance on Sharpsburg was visible from the woods about the Dunker church and those men, like the larger mass that advanced from the captured sunken lane, were met by the horror of Lee's artillery line. Some of Starbuck's men fired their rifles at the distant enemy, but most were content to shelter in the trees and watch as the artillery explosions gouged the enemy. Their own gun, the Napoleon they had captured, stood fifty yards away. Potter had begun to carve a legend on the gun's
trail, "A gift from the Yellow
legs" but the hardness of the wood had blunted his small pocket-knife and he had abandoned his efforts. "It's odd," he said to Starbuck now, "but one day this will all be in the history books."

"Odd?" Starbuck frowned as he tried to wrench his thoughts from his parched weariness to Potter's airy statement. "Why odd?"

"Because I guess I never thought of America as a place where history is made," Potter said, "at least, not since the Revolution. History belongs to the rest of the world. Crimea, Napoleon, Garibaldi, the Indian mutiny." He shrugged. "We came to America to escape history, isn't that right?"

"We're making it now," Starbuck said curtly.

"Then we'd better make sure we win," Potter said, "because history is written by the winners." He yawned. "Do I have permission to get drunk?"

"Not yet. This thing ain't over."

Potter grimaced, then stared at the cannon. "I've always wanted to fire a cannon," Potter said wistfully.

"Me too," Starbuck said.

"How difficult can it be?" Potter inquired. "Ain't nothing but an oversized rifle. A man don't need a college degree."

Starbuck gazed at the enemy, whose enthusiasm had been blunted by the day's carnage so that their advance now wavered under the rain of artillery shells. Maybe another gun, opening from their flank, would push them back. "We can try," he said, encouraged by the thought that the Yankees were far enough away for their skirmishers to be inaccurate. "A couple of shots, maybe."

"It is our gun," Potter said firmly. "We'd be sadly remiss not to check that it works before handing it over."

"True," Starbuck hesitated, once more gauging the distance between the Napoleon and the distant Yankees. "Let's try it," he decided.

Three of Potter's company volunteered to serve as crew, one of them the Irish saddler, John Connolly, who had a bloody bandage round his left arm but insisted he was fit enough to fight; then Lucifer insisted that he knew something of artillery, though Starbuck suspected the boy simply wanted to join in the excitement of firing a cannon.

No Yankee noticed them as they ran forward. The gun was still pointing toward the woods by the Dunker church, so Potter and his men lifted the tail and maneuvered the heavy barrel around while Starbuck rummaged in the limber that had already yielded three full canteens of water and a boiled ham wrapped in canvas for his hungry men. Now he pulled out a bag of powder, a case shot, and a package of fuses. The instructions on the packet told him to tear off the paper, then press against the small end of the fuse. "I thought this was supposed to be easy,"
Starbuck
said. He had extracted one of the fuses, a simple paper tube filled with powder, but he could not relate the tube to the printed instructions.

"Give it me," Lucifer said, and he tore the fuse into halves and pushed one half into a drilled copper plug that formed part of the case shot. "Five seconds is too long," Lucifer said, judging the distance to the enemy. "Give it two and a half."

"How the hell do you know all this?" Starbuck asked.

"Just do," Lucifer said, once again hiding his past. His dog was tied to his belt by its leash of rifle slings that almost tangled Lucifer's legs as he carried the shell to the gun. "You have to put the powder in first," he told Starbuck.

Starbuck pushed the powder bag into the tube, then Lucifer plugged the case shot into the muzzle. A bullet whistled overhead. Starbuck guessed it was an errant shot, not deliberately aimed at his men.

Lucifer had taken charge now. He had found the friction primer and a vent pick and, once the charge had been rammed down the barrel, he leaned over the muzzle and pushed the pick hard down to pierce the canvas bag of powder. He inserted the friction primer, attached the lanyard that had been in the dead gunner's hand, then stepped back. "Ready," he said.

"What about the elevation?" Colonel Swynyard had seen the activity about the gun and come to join the makeshift crew. "Looks low to me," he added, gesturing at the wormed elevating screw.

Starbuck gave the screw a pair of turns, but it seemed to make little difference. Maybe a man did need a college degree after all. "Let's just fire the damn thing," he said, then held up a hand. "Wait." The dead gunner with his wife's picture still on his lap had fallen behind the wheel and Starbuck first dragged the body clear, then picked up the tintype. It seemed sacrilegious to throw it away, so he put the picture in his pocket, then nodded at Lucifer. "You fire it," he said.

Fifty yards behind the gun Sergeant Case took aim. He had found Captain Dennison and the two men were in the brush at the wood's edge. Case had almost given up hope of finding an opportunity to kill Starbuck, but suddenly Starbuck was fifty yards away and in the open while Case and Dennison were hidden deep in brush. "Fire when the nigger pulls the string," Case told the Captain. "You go for the bastard's body, I'll go for a head shot."

Dennison, dry mouthed, could not answer, so just nodded. He was desperately nervous. He was about to commit murder and his hand was shaking as he rested his rifle on a small hillock. The men about the cannon had their backs to him and he was suddenly unsure which was Starbuck, but then he recognized the revolver holster Starbuck always wore at the small of his back and he aimed a few inches above it, where the gray jacket was darkened by a smear of blood. Case, calmer than Dennison, aimed at Starbuck's black hair. "Wait till they fire," he warned Dennison.

Dennison nodded again, and the small movement was enough to dislodge the sights from his target. He hurriedly re
-
aimed and had only just realized that he was sighting the wrong man when Lucifer ducked away from the gun and yanked the lanyard.

The Napoleon crashed back, its wheels bucking six inches up from the turf as the lunette at the end of its tail plowed hard back through the dirt. The noise was immense, a crack to hurt the ears of anyone within fifty paces. Smoke gushed ahead, writhing with flame, and under the cover of the noise, while the remnants of the Yellowlegs cheered, Case and Dennison fired.

Potter pitched violently forward onto the ground.

Starbuck was turning as the bullet hit Potter and, as he turned, a mist of blood exploded from the side of his face and then he too fell.

The shell screamed across the field. The elevation had been much too low and the smoking case shot ricocheted off a patch of dry ground to explode harmlessly behind the Yankees. It killed no one.