Bernard Cornwell – The Bloody Ground (страница 2)

“They tell us from time to time,” Davies answered laconically.

“Maybe they have gone,” Starbuck said, but no sooner had he spoken than one of the Yankee field guns fired. It had been loaded with canister, a tin cylinder crammed with musket balls that shredded apart at the gun’s muzzle to scatter its missiles like a giant charge of buckshot, and the balls ripped through the trees above Starbuck. The gun had been aimed fractionally too high and its fire wounded no one, but the blast of metal cascaded a deluge of water and leaves onto Starbuck’s miserable infantrymen. Starbuck, crouching low beside Davies, shivered from the unwanted shower. “Bastards,” he said again, but the useless curse was drowned by a crack of thunder that split the sky and rumbled into silence. “There was a time,” Starbuck said sourly, “when I thought guns sounded like thunder. Now I think thunder sounds like guns.” He considered that thought for a second. “How often did you ever hear a cannon in peacetime?”

“Never,” Davies said. His spectacles were mottled with rainwater. “Except maybe on the Fourth.”

“The Fourth and Evacuation Day,” Starbuck said.

“Evacuation Day?” Davies asked, never having heard of it.

“March seventeenth,” Starbuck said. “It’s the day we kicked the English out of Boston. There are cannon and fireworks in Boston Garden.” Starbuck was a Bostonian, a northerner who fought for the rebel South against his own kind. He did not fight out of political conviction, but rather because the accidents of youth had stranded him in the South when the war began and now, a year and a half later, he was a major in the Confederate army. He was barely older than most of the boys he led, and younger than many, but a year and a half of battles had put a grim maturity into his lean, dark face. By rights, he sometimes reflected wonderingly, he should still be studying for the ministry at Yale’s Divinity School, but instead he was crouched in a soaking wet uniform beside a soaking wet cornfield plotting how to kill some soaking wet Yankees who had managed to kill some of his men. “How many dry charges can you muster?” he asked Davies.

“A dozen,” Davies answered dubiously, “maybe.”

“Load ’em up and wait here. When I give the order I want you to kill those damn gunners. I’ll fetch you some help.” He slapped Davies’s back and ran back into the trees, then worked his way further west until he reached A Company and Captain Truslow, a short, thick-set, and indefatigable man whom Starbuck had promoted from sergeant to captain just weeks before. “Any dry cartridges?” Starbuck asked as he dropped beside the captain.

“Plenty.” Truslow spat tobacco juice into a puddle. “Been holding out fire till you needed it.”

“Full of tricks, aren’t you?” Starbuck said, pleased.

“Full of sense,” Truslow said dourly.

“I want one volley into the gunners. You and Davies kill the gunners and I’ll take the rest of the Legion over the field.”

Truslow nodded. He was a taciturn man, a widower, and as hard as the hill farm he had left to fight against the Northern invaders.

“Wait for my order,” Starbuck added, then backed into the trees again, though there was small respite from the rain under the thick leaf cover that had long before been soaked by the downpour. It seemed impossible for rain to go on this venomously for this long, but there seemed to be no diminution to the cloudburst that beat on the trees with its sustained and demonic force. Lightning flickered to the south, then a crash of thunder sounded so loud overhead that Starbuck flinched from the noise. A slash of pain whipped across his face and he staggered back, dropped to his knees, and clapped a hand to his left cheek. When he took his hand away he saw that his palm was covered in blood. For a moment he just stared helplessly at the blood being diluted and washed off his hand, then, when he tried to stand, he discovered that he was too weak. He was shaking and he thought he was going to vomit, then he feared his bowels would empty. He was making a pathetic mewing noise, like a wounded kitten. One part of his mind knew that he was not in any trouble, that the wound was slight, that he could see and think and breathe, but still he could not control the shaking, though he did manage to stop the stupid kitten noise and take in a deep breath of humid air. He took another breath, wiped more blood from his cheek, and forced himself to stand. The thunder, he realized, had not been thunder at all, but a blast of canister from the second Yankee gun, and one of the canister’s musket balls had driven a splinter from a tree trunk that had razored his face to the cheekbone. An inch higher and he would have lost an eye, but instead the wound was clean and trivial, though it had still left Starbuck quivering and frightened. Alone in the trees he leaned for an instant on the scarred trunk and closed his eyes. Get me out of here alive, he prayed, do that and I’ll never sin again.

He felt ashamed of himself. He had reacted to the scratch as though it had been a mortal wound, but still he felt bowel-threatening spasms of fear as he walked east toward his right-hand companies. Those companies were the least loyal, the companies that resented being commanded by a renegade Yankee, and those were the companies he would have to provoke out of their miserable shelters into the open cornfield. Their reluctance to attack was not just a question of loyalty, but also the natural instinct of wet, tired, and miserable men to crouch motionless rather than offer themselves to enemy rifles. “Bayonets!” Starbuck shouted as he passed behind the line of men. “Fix bayonets!” He was warning them that they would have to advance again and he heard grumbling coming from some of the soldiers, but he ignored their sullen defiance, for he did not know if he was in a fit state to confront it. He feared his voice would crack like a child’s if he turned on them. He wondered what in God’s name was happening to him. One small scratch and he was reduced to shivering helplessness! He told himself it was just the rain that had soaked his tiredness into pure misery. Like his men he needed a rest, just as he needed time to reshape the Legion and to scatter the troublemakers into different companies, but the speed of the campaign in northern Virginia was denying Lee’s army the luxury of time.

The campaign had started when the North’s John Pope had begun a ponderous advance on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. That advance had been checked, then destroyed at the second battle to be fought on the banks of the Bull Run, and now Lee’s army was pushing the remaining Yankees back toward the Potomac River. With any luck, Starbuck thought, the Yankees would cross into Maryland and the Confederate army would be given the days it so desperately needed to draw breath and to find boots and coats for men who looked more like a rabble of vagabond tramps than an army. Yet the vagabonds had done all that their country had demanded of them. They had blunted and destroyed the Yankees’ latest attempt to capture Richmond and now they were driving the larger Northern army out of the Confederacy altogether.

He found Lieutenant Waggoner at the right-hand end of the line. Peter Waggoner was a good man, a pious soldier who lived with a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, and if any of his company showed cowardice they would be hit by one of those two formidable weapons. Lieutenant Coffman, a mere boy, was crouching beside Waggoner and Starbuck sent him to fetch the captains of the other right-flank companies. Waggoner frowned at Starbuck. “Are you all right, sir?”

“A scratch, just a scratch,” Starbuck said. He licked his cheek, tasting salty blood.

“You’re awful pale,” Waggoner said.

“This rain’s the first decent wash I’ve had in two weeks,” Starbuck said. The shaking had stopped, but he nevertheless felt like an actor as he grinned at Waggoner. He was pretending not to be frightened and pretending that all was well, but his mind was as skittish as an unbroken colt. He turned away from the Lieutenant and peered into the eastern trees, searching for the rest of Swynyard’s Brigade. “Is anyone still there?” he asked Waggoner.

“Haxall’s men. They ain’t doing nothing.”

“Keeping dry, eh?”

“Never known rain like it,” Waggoner grumbled. “It never rains when you want it. Never in spring. Always rains just before harvest or when you’re cutting hay.” A rifle fired from the Yankee wood and the bullet thudded into a maple behind Waggoner. The big man frowned resentfully toward the Yankees almost as though he felt the bullet was a discourtesy. “You got any idea where we are?” he asked Starbuck.

“Somewhere near the Flatlick,” Starbuck said, “wherever the hell that is.” He only knew that the Flatlick ran somewhere in Northern Virginia. They had pitched the Yankees out of their entrenchments in Centreville and were now trying to capture a ford the Northerners were using for their retreat, though Starbuck had seen neither stream nor road all day. Colonel Swynyard had told him that the stream was called the Flatlick Branch, though the Colonel had not been really sure of that. “You ever heard of the Flatlick?” Starbuck now asked Waggoner.