Bernard Cornwell – Battle Flag (страница 14)

“News of victory, I hope?” Banks suggested to the newly arrived aide.

“The General’s requesting reinforcements, sir,” the aide said respectfully. His horse trembled as a rebel shell wailed overhead.

“Reinforcements?” Banks asked. In the pause after his question the rebel shell exploded harmlessly behind, scattering dirt across the road. “Reinforcements?” Banks said again, frowning as though he found the word incomprehensible. Then he straightened his already immaculate uniform. “Reinforcements?” he asked a third time. “But I thought he was driving the enemy from the field?”

“We need to break them, sir.” The aide sounded enthusiastic. “One more brigade will rout them utterly.”

“I hoped they were finished already,” Banks said, crumpling Crawford’s message in his hand.

“They’re skulking in some woods, sir. Our fellows are pressing hard, but they’ll need help.”

“There isn’t any help!” Banks said indignantly, as though the aide were spoiling his moment of glory. “I sent him Gordon’s brigade; isn’t that enough?”

The aide glanced at the gaudily uniformed Pennsylvania Zouaves who formed General Banks’s personal bodyguard. “Maybe we should send every man available, sir, to destroy them before they’re saved by nightfall?” He spoke very respectfully, as befitted a captain offering tactical advice to a major general.

“We have no reserves, Captain,” Banks said in a peevish voice. “We are fully committed! So press on. Press hard. Tell Crawford it’s his responsibility now. I won’t have men calling for help, not when we’re on the verge of victory. Go back and tell him to push on hard, you hear me? Push on hard and no stopping till nightfall.” The long speech had restored Banks’s confidence. He was winning; it was God’s will that the vaunted Stonewall Jackson should be humbled. “It’s nervousness, plain nervousness,” Banks explained General Crawford’s request to the men who surrounded him. “A fellow finds himself on the winning side and can’t believe his luck so he asks for help at the last moment!”

“I hope you’ll be kind to Crawford in your memoirs, sir,” the Zouave commander observed.

“To be sure, to be sure,” Banks said, who had not considered his memoirs till this moment, but now found himself dreaming of a three-volume work, provisionally entitled Banks’s War. He decided he would depict his early defeats as necessary deceptions that had lured the cabbage-eating Jackson on to destruction at Cedar Mountain. “I might have been reviled”—the General rehearsed a sentence in his head—“but I was playing a longer hand than my critics knew, especially those journalistic curs who dared to offer me advice even though not one of them could tell a Parrott gun from a bird’s beak.”

The Reverend Elial Starbuck broke this pleasant reverie by begging Banks’s permission to ride forward so he could observe the pursuit and final humiliation of the enemy. “Your triumph is an answer to my prayers, Governor,” the preacher said, “and I would dearly like to witness its full fruits.”

“My dear Starbuck, of course you must ride forward. Captain Hetherington?” Banks summoned one of his junior aides to accompany the preacher, though he also cautioned the aide not to expose the Reverend Starbuck to any danger. The caution was given to make certain that the Reverend Starbuck survived to preach Banks’s fame from his influential pulpit. “A wounded cur can still bite,” Banks warned the preacher, “so you must stay well clear of the dying beast’s jaws.”

“God will preserve me, Governor,” the Reverend Starbuck averred. “He is my strong shield and protector.”

Thus guarded, the Reverend Starbuck set off across the fields with Hetherington, first threading a path between rows of army wagons with white canvas hoods, then passing a field hospital where the Reverend Starbuck paused to inspect the faces of the wounded Southern prisoners who lay after surgery on the grass outside the tents. Some were still comatose from the effects of chloroform, a few slept from sheer weariness, but the majority lay pale and frightened. A few crudely bandaged casualties lay waiting for the surgeons’ knives, and to anyone unaccustomed to battle the sight of such grievously hurt men might have proved more than the strongest stomach could abide, but the Reverend Starbuck seemed positively enlivened by the horrid spectacle. Indeed, he leaned out of his saddle for a closer look at one man’s mangled limbs and bloodied scalp. “You note the low cranial gap and the pronounced teeth?” he observed to Hetherington.

“Sir?” Hetherington asked in puzzlement.

“Look at his face, man! Look at any of their faces! Can’t you see the pronounced difference between them and the Northern visage?”

Captain Hetherington thought that the Southerners did not look very much different from Northerners, except that they were generally thinner and a good deal more raggedly uniformed, but he did not want to contradict the eminent preacher, and so he agreed that the captured rebels did indeed display low foreheads and feral teeth.

“Such features are the classic symptoms of feeblemindedness and moral degradation,” the Reverend Starbuck announced happily, then remembered the Christian duty that was owed even to such fallen souls as these rebel prisoners. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” he called down to them, “yet you may be washed whiter than snow. You must repent! You must repent!” He had come equipped with copies of his tract, Freeing the Oppressed, which explained why Christian men should be prepared to die for the sacred cause of abolishing slavery, and now the Reverend Starbuck dropped a few copies among the wounded men. “Something to read during your imprisonment,” he told them, “something to explain your errors.” He spurred on, cheered by this chance to have spread the good word. “We have been remiss, Captain,” the preacher declared to Hetherington as the two men left the hospital behind, “in restricting our mission work to heathen lands and Southern slaves. We should have sent more good men into the rebellious states to tussle with the demons that dwell in the white man’s soul.”

“There are plenty of churches, are there not, in the secessionist states?” Captain Hetherington inquired respectfully after leading the preacher around a tangle of telegraph wire that had been dumped beside a ditch.

“There are indeed churches in the South,” the Reverend Starbuck said in a tone of distaste, “and pastors, too, I dare say, yet their existence should not deceive us. The scriptures warn us against those false prophets who shall inhabit the latter days. And such prophets have no difficulty in persuading the feebleminded to adopt the devil’s ways. But the Second Epistle of Peter promises us that the false prophets shall bring upon themselves a swift destruction. I think we are witnessing the beginnings of that providence. For this is the Lord’s doing,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed happily, gesturing toward two dogs that fought over a dead man’s intestines close to a smoking shell crater, “and we should rejoice and be glad in it!” A less pious impulse made the Reverend wonder whether the money he had just expended on Galloway’s Horse was going to be wasted. Maybe the war would be won without Galloway’s men? Then he thrust that concern away and let this day’s good news fill him with joy instead.

Captain Hetherington wanted to drive the two dogs away from their offal, but the Reverend Starbuck was spurring ahead, and the aide’s duty was to stay with the preacher, so he galloped to catch up. “Are you saying, sir,” Hetherington asked respectfully, “that none of the rebels are Christians?”

“How can they be?” the Boston preacher responded. “Our faith has never preached rebellion against the lawful and godly authority of the state, so at best the South is in grievous error and thus in desperate need of repentance and forgiveness. And at worst?” The Reverend Starbuck shook his head rather than even consider such a question, yet the very asking of it made him think of his second son and how Nate was even now irretrievably committed to the fires of hell. Nate would burn in everlasting flames, tormented through all eternity by agonies unimaginable. “And he deserves it!” the Reverend Starbuck protested aloud.

“I’m sorry, sir?” Hetherington asked, thinking he had misheard a comment addressed to him.

“Nothing, Captain, nothing. You are saved yourself?”

“Indeed, sir. I came to Christ three years ago, and have praised God for His mercies ever since.”

“Praise Him indeed,” the Reverend Starbuck responded, though in truth he was secretly disappointed that his escort should thus prove to be a born-again Christian, for there were few things Elial Starbuck enjoyed so much as having what he called a tussle with a sinner. He could boast of having left many a strong man in tears after an hour’s good argument.

The two men arrived at a Northern battery of twelve-pounder Napoleons. The four guns were silent, their shirtsleeved gunners leaning on their weapons’ wheels and staring across the valley to where a long-shadowed stand of trees was crowned with gunsmoke. “No targets, sir,” the battery commander answered when the Reverend Starbuck asked why he was not firing. “Our fellows are inside those woods, sir, or maybe a half-mile beyond, which means our job’s done for the day.” He took a pull of his flask, which contained brandy. “Those shell bursts are rebel guns firing long, sir,” he added, gesturing at the white explosions that blossomed intermittently on the far crest. The sound of each explosion followed a few seconds later like a small rumble of thunder. “Just their rear guard,” the artilleryman said confidently, “and we can leave the peasantry to look after them.”