“I think we’d better stay here,” Adam suggested. Sergeant Major Proctor nodded agreement, and Major Bird looked up at Starbuck, appeal in his eyes.
“I saw the northerners,” Starbuck said.
“I’m not moving,” Ridley announced, and a murmur of agreement supported his stand.
“Why don’t we send an officer to have Evans’s orders confirmed?” Captain Hinton suggested sensibly. Hinton, like a dozen other officers and sergeants, had come to join the discussion.
“Don’t you have written orders, Nate?” Anthony Murphy asked.
“There wasn’t time to put anything in writing,” Starbuck said.
Ridley laughed sourly, while Thaddeus Bird looked uncertain, as though wondering if he had made the right decision.
“Where’s Evans now?” Hinton asked.
“He’s moving his men from the stone bridge to the Sudley Road.” Starbuck was feeling increasingly desperate.
“Is that the Sudley Road?” Thomas Truslow’s growl interrupted the proceedings.
“Yes,” Starbuck said. Truslow had been pointing north across the shallow valley.
“And you saw Yankees out there?”
“Beyond the fords, yes.”
Truslow nodded, but to Starbuck’s disappointment said nothing more. Across the turnpike a small group of gray-clad horsemen galloped up to the far crest, their horses leaving dark hoofprints in the turf. The Legion’s officers watched until the horsemen disappeared into the far trees. The horsemen were the only sign that anything might be happening beyond the army’s left flank, but there were so few of the cavalry that their maneuver was hardly convincing evidence. “It means nothing,” Adam said dubiously.
“It means we move to support Colonel Evans”—Bird had decided to stick to his decision—“and the next man to disobey my order will be shot!” Bird drew a Le Mat revolver, which he hefted in his thin right hand, then, as though unsure whether or not he could really carry out his threat, he passed the brutal-looking gun up to Starbuck. “You will shoot, Lieutenant Starbuck, and that is an order. You hear me?”
“Very clearly, sir!” Starbuck realized that the situation had gotten disastrously out of hand, but he did not know what he could do to restore sanity. The Legion was desperate for leadership, but the Colonel was missing and no one seemed adequate to step into his boots. Starbuck himself was a northerner, and a mere second lieutenant if he was anything at all, while Thaddeus Bird was a laughingstock, a country schoolmaster masquerading in a soldier’s gaudy uniform, yet only Bird and Starbuck understood what needed to be done, but neither man could impose his will on the regiment and Starbuck, holding the awkward pistol, knew he would never dare use it.
Major Bird took three formal paces forward. He appeared ludicrous as he paced the three giant steps, which he doubtless thought were solemn but which looked more like the gait of a clown clumping upstage on stilts. He turned and stood to attention. “The Legion will come to attention! On your feet!”
Gradually, reluctantly, the men stood. They pulled on their haversacks and lifted their rifles from the grass. Bird waited, then snapped his next orders. “The Legion will advance by column of companies. Company A! By the right! Quick march!”
Not one soldier moved. They had stood up, but they would not move away from their patch of hillside. Company A looked at Captain Hinton for a lead, but Hinton was clearly troubled by the order and made no attempt to enforce it. Thaddeus Bird swallowed hard, then looked up at Starbuck. The pistol felt hugely heavy in Starbuck’s hand.
“Lieutenant Starbuck?” Major Bird’s voice was a yelp.
“Oh, Uncle Thaddeus, please!” Adam appealed.
The men were on the edge of hysterical laughter, placed there by the ludicrous bathos of Adam’s homely appeal, and it would have taken just one more syllable to trigger that laughter when a hard voice, as sudden and grim as the ripsaw sound of the passing shells, turned the Legion’s mood into instant apprehension. “Company K! Shoulder arms!”
Truslow had paced back to the Legion’s left flank and now shouted the order. Company K snapped to obey him. “On my mark!” he shouted. “Forward march!”
Company K crashed out of line, advancing down the hill. Truslow, squat and dark-faced, did not look left or right, but paced ahead with his deliberate, countryman’s stride. Captain Roswell Jenkins, the company’s commanding officer, galloped after the company, but his remonstrance to Truslow was utterly ignored. We came here to fight, Truslow seemed to be saying, so for God’s sake, let us get off our butts and fight.
Captain Murphy, commanding D Company, looked questioningly at Starbuck. Starbuck nodded, and the simple confirmation was enough for Murphy. “Company D!” he shouted, and the men did not even wait for the order to advance, but just started after Truslow’s men. The rest of the Legion edged forward. Sergeant Major Proctor looked wildly up at Adam, who shrugged, while Major Bird, at last seeing his orders obeyed, stirred the laggards into motion.
Ridley turned his horse wildly, looking for allies, but the Faulconer Legion was marching west, led by a sergeant, and the officers were left to catch up with their men. Starbuck himself, who had precipitated the move northward, now turned away to shout at Adam. “Where’s my coat?”
Adam pushed his horse through the bandsmen, who were making a cacophony of thumps and squawks as they hurried to catch up with the advancing Legion. “Nate!” Adam sounded distressed. “What have you done?”
“I told you. The federals are coming round our rear. Do you know where my jacket is?” Starbuck had dismounted beside Joe Sparrow’s dead body. He picked up Sparrow’s rifle and tugged off the dead boy’s belt with its canteen, cartridge box and cap box.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked.
“Arming myself. I’ll be damned if I spend the rest of this day without a gun. People are killing each other here.” Starbuck meant the words as a grim joke, but their flippancy made him sound hard.
“But Father sent you home!” Adam protested.
Starbuck turned a bitter face on his friend. “You can’t dictate my loyalty, Adam. Work out your own, but leave me mine.”
Adam bit his lip, then twisted in his saddle. “Nelson! Bring Mister Starbuck’s coat and weapons!”
The Colonel’s servant, who had been waiting beside the Legion’s piled knapsacks, tents and baggage, brought Starbuck his old sword, pistol and coat. Starbuck nodded his thanks, pulled on the coat, then strapped on the sword belt with its heavy pistol. “I seem to be over-weaponed,” he said, looking at his own revolver, at Joe Sparrow’s rifle and at Major Bird’s Le Mat revolver. He threw down the rifle, then grimaced at the ugly Le Mat. “It’s a nasty-looking brute, isn’t it?” The revolver had two barrels, the upper one rifled for bullets, the lower a smoothbore barrel that took a shotgun cartridge. Starbuck broke the gun open and laughed, then showed Adam that the cylinder’s nine chambers were all empty. The shotgun barrel was loaded, but the revolving hammer, by which the user could select which barrel to fire, had been twisted upward to fall on one of the empty chambers. “It wasn’t loaded,” Starbuck said, “Pecker was bluffing.”
“He’s not bluffing now!” Adam protested and gestured at his father’s Legion, which was now halfway down the hill. “Look what you’ve done!”
“Adam! For Christ’s sake, I saw the Yankees. They are coming straight toward us, and if we don’t stop them then this war is over.”
“Isn’t that what we want?” Adam demanded. “One battle, you promised me, then we could talk.”
“Not now, Adam.” Starbuck had neither the time nor patience for his friend’s scruples. He belted his saber and holster belt over his jacket and hauled himself into his saddle just as Ethan Ridley rode back to the hilltop.
“I’m going to find your father, Adam.” Ridley ignored Starbuck.
Adam stared downhill to where his neighbors and friends were marching northward. “Nate? Are you sure you saw northerners?”
“I saw them, Adam. After
I left you. They were beyond the Sudley Fords and marching this way. They fired at me, Adam, they chased me! I didn’t imagine it.” The chase had been brief, confused by the woods, and his northern pursuers had given up five minutes before Starbuck had been captured by the two Louisianan cavalrymen who had refused to cross the fords to discover the truth of Starbuck’s story for themselves.
“He’s lying,” Ridley said calmly, then blanched as Starbuck turned toward him.
Starbuck said nothing to Ridley. Instead he was thinking that he was going to kill this man, but not in front of Adam. He would do it in the chaos of battle where no witness could bring a charge of murder. “The Yankees are coming across at Sudley,” Starbuck said, turning back to his friend, “and there’s no one else who can stop them.”
“But…” Adam seemed wholly unable to grasp the enormity of Starbuck’s news—that this left wing of the rebel army really was threatened, and that his confident, wealthy, assured father had been wrong.
“It’s Thermopylae, Adam,” Starbuck said earnestly, “think of it as Thermopylae.”
“It’s what?” Ethan Ridley demanded. Ridley had never heard of Thermopylae, where Xerxes’s Persians had stolen a flank march on Leonidas’s Greeks to snatch victory, nor how the three hundred Spartans had sacrificed themselves so that the other Greeks could escape. Nathan Evans seemed an unlikely Greek hero, but today he was playing the Spartan role and Adam, given a classical context to the emergency, instantly understood that his father’s tenants and his father’s neighbors had marched off to become heroes and he could not simply let them die alone. A Faulconer had to be there, and if his father was absent, then Adam must be present.
“We have to fight, don’t we?” Adam said, though unhappily.
“You should go to your father!” Ridley insisted.
“No. I have to go with Nate,” Adam said.
Ridley felt a pulse of victory. The crown prince was siding with the king’s enemy, and Ridley would replace them both. Ridley turned his horse. “I’m going for your father,” he called back as he spurred away past Joe Sparrow’s body.
Adam looked at his friend and shivered. “I’m frightened.”
“So am I,” Starbuck said, and thought of the severed leg spinning across the road spilling its trails of blood. “But so are the Yankees, Adam.”
“I guess they are,” Adam said, then clicked his tongue to urge his horse forward. Starbuck followed more clumsily on Pocahontas, and thus the two friends rode down the hill to follow the Legion northward. Above them, in the clear summer air, a howitzer shell drew a trail of smoke across the sky, then fell to earth and exploded somewhere in the woods.
It was still not nine o’clock in the morning.
Advancing in column of companies had not been Major Bird’s happiest inspiration, but he had thought it the quickest way to get the Legion moving and so he had ordered it. The formation demanded that the companies march in line abreast, four ranks deep, each rank comprising nineteen or twenty men depending on the company’s strength, and the ten companies making a long, broad column with the color party at its center and the band and Doctor Danson bringing up the rear.
The problem was that the Legion had never really rehearsed maneuvers in anything but the flat pastureland at Faulconer Court House, and now they were advancing across a landscape that contained inconvenient ditches, rail fences, bushes, dips, knolls, blackberries, streams and impenetrable thickets of trees. They managed to cross the turnpike successfully enough, but the trees about the stone house and the rail fences of the pastures beyond caused the companies to lose all their cohesion and, naturally enough, the men preferred to use the road and so the column of companies became a long straggling line of men that jostled onto the dirt track before advancing toward the trees at the top of the farther hill.
But at least the men were cheerful. Most were glad to be moving, and happier still to have escaped the bare hillside where the overshot enemy shells fell so randomly, and somehow the morning took on a sportive atmosphere like the sylvan days of training back in Faulconer County. They joked as they climbed the hill, boasting what they would do to the Yankees they only half-expected to meet on the farther slope. Many of the men suspected that Pecker Bird had got everything plain bad wrong and that the Colonel would wring his damned neck as soon as he came back from his meeting with the general, but that was Pecker’s problem, not theirs. No one expressed any such suspicions to Truslow, who had begun the whole march and who now stolidly led the Legion north.
Starbuck and Adam galloped their horses up the side of the column until they found Thaddeus Bird striding along with the color party. Starbuck leaned precariously from his saddle to offer Major Bird the big Le Mat revolver. “Your pistol, sir. Did you know it wasn’t loaded?”
“Of course it wasn’t loaded.” Bird took the gun from Starbuck. “Did you really think I wanted you to shoot someone?” Bird chuckled, then turned to look at the straggle of men advancing in shambolic order up the dirt road and into the woods. So this was Washington Faulconer’s elite force? Faulconer’s Imperial Guard? The thought made Bird laugh aloud.
“Sir?” Starbuck thought Bird had spoken.
“Nothing, Starbuck, nothing. Except I have a suspicion that we should be advancing in more soldierly order.”
Starbuck pointed ahead to where a patch of sky promised open country at the far side of the thick belt of woodland which crowned the ridge. “There are fields over the hillcrest, sir. You can shake the men into proper line there.”
It occurred to Bird that Starbuck had ridden this road when the Colonel had tried to get rid of him. “Why didn’t you go when Faulconer gave you the chance?” he asked Starbuck. “Do you really want to fight for the South?”
“I do, yes.” But this was hardly the time to explain how quixotic that decision was, nor why the sight of the axemen in the woods had prompted his sudden decision. It was not, he knew, a rational choice, but rather a revulsion against his family, and Starbuck was suddenly amazed at the way in which life presented such choices, and the carelessness with which those choices could be taken even though the resultant decision might utterly change everything that would ever follow, right down to the grave itself. How much history, he wondered, had been made by such flippant choices? How many important decisions were taken from mere pride or from lust or even out of sloth? All Starbuck’s religion, all his upbringing, had taught him that there was a plan to life and a divine purpose to man’s existence, yet this morning he had taken a shotgun to that idea and had blasted it clean out of God’s firmament, and it seemed to Starbuck that his world, as a result, was a better and clearer place.
“Since you are on our side,” Thaddeus Bird spoke from beside Starbuck’s left stirrup, “would you ride ahead and stop the men at the open land you promised me? I’d rather we didn’t stream into battle like a flock of sinners scurrying for repentance.” He waved Starbuck forward with a flourish of the Le Mat pistol.
By the time Starbuck reached the column’s head Sergeant Truslow had already ordered his men off the road. Company K had reached the crest of the hill where Starbuck had been expelled from the Legion by the Colonel and where the trees gave way to a long, gentle slope of empty pastureland. Truslow was lining his men in two ranks just short of a zigzag rail fence that had been placed to keep cattle from straying out of the grassland and into the trees. K Company’s commanding officer was nowhere to be seen, but Truslow did not need officers. He needed targets. “Make certain you’re loaded!” he growled at his men.
“Sergeant! Look!” A man at the right flank of the company pointed to the open country where a horde of oddly dressed troops had suddenly appeared from among the trees. The strange troops wore baggy bright red shirts, voluminous black and white pantaloons tucked into white gaiters, and floppy red caps tipped with long blue tassels. It was a regiment in fashionable Zouave uniform that aped the famous light infantry of France.
“Leave ’em alone!” Truslow bellowed. “They’re
our clowns!” He had spotted the Confederate flag in the center of the weirdly uniformed troops. “Face front!” he shouted. More of the Legion’s men were emerging from the road to form on the right of Truslow’s company, while the Legion’s officers, unsure exactly what was happening or who was commanding this sudden deployment, huddled excitedly at the edge of the trees. Major Bird shouted at the officers to join their companies, then looked to his right to see still more Confederate troops emerging from the trees to fill the wide gap between the Legion and the brightly uniformed Zouaves. The newcomers wore gray, and their arrival meant that a hasty defensive line was forming at the wood’s northern edge to face a long wide stretch of open ground that fell softly away from the zigzag fence, past a farmhouse and hayrick, to where a farther belt of woodland hid the distant Sudley Fords. The long open slope seemed designed for the defenders’ rifles, a killing ground lit by a merciless sun.
Colonel Evans galloped on his borrowed gray horse to where the Faulconer Legion was still forming its ranks. “Well done, Boston! Well done!” He greeted Starbuck, then added gesture to the congratulations by swerving his horse close by the northerner and slapping him hard on the back. “Well done! Is Colonel Faulconer here?”
“No, sir.”
“Who’s commanding?”
“Major Bird. By the colors, sir.”
“Bird!” Evans turned his horse hard, slewing soil and grass up from its hooves. “We just have to hold the bastards here. We have to give the bastards hell.” His nervous horse had stopped, blowing and shivering as Evans stared northward down the long open slope. “If they’re coming,” he added the words softly. His left hand was drumming nervously on his thigh. The German orderly with the “barrelito” of whiskey reined in behind the Colonel, as did a dozen staff officers and a mounted standard-bearer who carried the palmetto flag of South Carolina. “I’ve got two guns coming,” Evans told Bird, “but no more infantry, so what we’ve got here will have to do the job until Beauregard wakes up to what’s happening. Those gaudy thieves,” he nodded toward the far Zouaves, “are Wheat’s Louisiana Tigers. I know they look like whores on a picnic, but Wheat says they’re mean sons of bitches in a fight. The nearer fellows are Sloan’s South Carolinians, and I know they’ll fight. I’ve promised them all Yankee meat for their supper. How are your rogues?”