The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

TWELVE

THE YANKEES CAME ON QUICK. Their predawn flanking march had taken hours longer than their commanders had expected, and now their task was to thrust hard and fast into the rebel rear before the Southerners had time to understand just what was happening.

Drums beat the pace as the first Northern regiments spread into their attack lines and as cannon unlimbered at the attackers’ flanks. Some guns were deployed on the dirt road, others in the farm at the foot of the slope from where they sent the first shells screaming up toward the wooded ridge where the thin line of Confederate forces waited. The advancing Yankees were confident. They had expected the Sudley Fords would be defended, then had half-feared that the Southerners might have fortified an unfinished railway embankment just beyond the fords, but instead they had encountered no resistance as they had steadily advanced into the rebel rear. The surprise of their attack seemed to be total, the ineptness of the Southern commanders complete, and all that now stood between the Federal forces and victory was this contemptible line of rebel farmboys who edged a wood at the long hill’s crest. ‘On to Richmond, boys!’ an officer shouted as the attack started up the gentle slope, and behind the blue-coated infantry a regimental band swung into the tune ‘John Brown’s Body,’ as though the ghost of that irascible old martyr was personally present to see the two leading regiments, both from Rhode Island, crack the rebel line apart.

More Northern troops emerged from the woods behind the advancing Rhode Islanders. Men from New York and New Hampshire joined the attack as the flanking guns jetted clouds of gray white smoke. Swift fan-shaped patterns of compressed gases rippled the long grass under the guns’ smoke as the shells seared up the slope. The explosions were mighty, ear splitting, terrible. Some shells, fired too high, crashed through the branches above the Confederate line, scaring birds out of the trees and showering twigs and leaves down onto the bandsmen and chaplains and servants and medical orderlies who crouched in the rear. A regiment of regular U.S. Army troops marched out from the trees, deployed from column into line, fixed their bayonets, and advanced uphill with the New Yorkers and New Englanders.

Colonel Evans had galloped back to his line’s center where Colonel Sloan’s South Carolinians were crouching at the wood’s edge to make themselves into a difficult target for the enemy artillery. A few rebel skirmishers had advanced beyond the fence and were firing rifles at the advancing Yankees, but Starbuck, watching from horseback at the trees’ edge, could see no sign that the rifle fire was causing any casualties. The enemy came steadily on, driven by the music of the distant Northern bands and by the beat of the drummers advancing with the companies and by the proximity of glorious victory that waited for the attackers at the hill’s crest where the first of Nathan Evans’s two ancient cannon had arrived. The gun was hurriedly unlimbered, turned, then fired a roundshot down the slope. The ball bounced on the turf, soared over the Rhode Islanders and plunged harmlessly into the trees beyond. A Northern shell exploded short. The sound of the airburst was appalling, as though part of the fabric of the universe itself had been suddenly cracked in two. The air became crazy with smoke and sizzling fragments. Starbuck shuddered. The artillery fire by the stone bridge had been scary, but this was much worse. These gunners were aiming directly at the Legion and their shells screeched like demons as they flashed overhead.

‘Skirmishers!’ Major Bird called in a cracked voice. He tried again, this time achieving a firmer tone. ‘Skirmishers! Advance!’

A and K companies, the Legion’s two flanking companies, clambered awkwardly over the fence rails and ran into the pastureland. The men were encumbered by their rifles, their sheathed bayonets, their bowie knives and haversacks, and by the canteens, pouches and cap boxes that hung from their belts. They made a loose formation a hundred paces ahead of the Legion. Their task was first to deter the enemy skirmishers, then to snipe at the main line of attackers. The riflemen opened fire, enveloping each kneeling marksman in a small cloud of smoke. Sergeant Truslow walked from man to man, while Captain Roswell Jenkins, still on horseback, fired his revolver at the distant Northerners.

‘Make sure your weapons are loaded!’ Major Bird called to the remaining eight companies. It seemed slightly late to remember such advice, but nothing seemed real this morning. Thaddeus Bird, schoolmaster, was commanding a regiment in battle? He giggled at the thought and earned a disapproving look from Sergeant Major Proctor. The Yankees were still five hundred paces away, but coming on at a smart pace now. The Northern officers carried drawn swords. Some carried the blades upright in a stiff attempt at formal dignity, while others slashed at dandelions and thistles as though they were out on a Sunday afternoon stroll. A few were mounted on nervous horses. One horse, scared by the gunfire, had gone out of control and was bolting with its rider across the face of the Northern attack.

Starbuck, dry-mouthed and apprehensive, remembered that his Savage pistol, which he had earlier returned to Colonel Faulconer and only just retrieved, was still unloaded. He pulled the heavy gun from its long clumsy holster, then released the cylinder lock to expose the empty chambers. He took six paper-wrapped cartridges from the pouch on his belt. Each cartridge contained a conical bullet and its powder charge. He bit the bullet off the first cartridge, tasting the bitter salty gunpowder on his tongue, then carefully poured the powder into one of the cylinder’s chambers. Pocahontas, bitten by a horsefly, suddenly whinnied and shifted sideways, causing Starbuck to spill some of the powder onto his saddle.

He swore at the horse, which meant that the bullet in his lips slipped free, bounced on the saddle pommel and fell into the grass. He swore again, tipped the powder from the chamber, and bit off a fresh bullet. This time, as he began to pour the charge, he found his hand was shaking and there seemed to be two chambers under the lip of the torn paper instead of one. His sight was blurred, then he realized his hand was shaking uncontrollably.

He looked up at the advancing enemy. Above them, oddly clear in his otherwise smeared eyesight, was the Stars and Stripes, his own flag, and suddenly Starbuck knew that there were no easy decisions, no turnings in life that could be taken flippantly. He gazed at the distant flag and knew he could not fire on it. His great-grandfather MacPhail had lost an eye on Breed’s Hill and later, fighting under Paul Revere at Penobscot Bay, had lost his right hand in the defense of that good flag, and suddenly Starbuck felt a catch in his throat. God, he thought, but I should not be here! None of us should be here! He suddenly understood all Adam’s objections to the war, all Adam’s unhappiness that this glorious country should find itself riven by battle, and he gazed longingly at the distant flag and was unaware of the first Yankee skirmishers’ bullets whipping hard overhead, or of the shell that exploded just short of the fence, or of the hoarse shouts as the Rhode Island sergeants shouted at their men to keep their lines straight as they advanced. Starbuck was oblivious to it all as he sat in the saddle, shaken, his trembling hand dribbling gunpowder down his thigh.

‘Are you all right?’ Adam joined him.

‘Not really.’

‘Now you understand, do you?’ Adam asked grimly.

‘Yes.’ Starbuck’s hands trembled as he closed up the still-unloaded revolver. His whole life suddenly seemed trivial, wasted, gone to hell. He had thought this morning that war would prove a fine adventure, a defiance to toss into his father’s face and an adventure story to describe to Sally, but instead it was proving to be something much more terrible and unexpected, as though a curtain in a frippery theater had lifted to reveal a glimpse of hell’s horrors seething with twisted flames. My God, he thought, but I could die here. I could be buried at this wood’s edge. ‘It was a girl,’ he blurted out.

‘Girl?’ Adam frowned with incomprehension.

‘In Richmond.’

‘Oh.’ Adam was embarrassed by Starbuck’s admission, but also troubled by it. ‘Father guessed as much,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand why you risk everything for …’ He stopped, maybe because he could not find the right words, or perhaps because a shell had smashed into a tree trunk and ripped a chunk of bright timber clean out of the wood and filled the shadows with its filthy sulfur-laden smoke. Adam licked his lips. ‘I’m thirsty.’

‘And me.’ Starbuck wondered why he had blurted out his confession. The Yankees were coming stolidly on. In minutes, he thought, just minutes, we have to fight. All the posturing and defiance has come to this warm meadow. He watched a Northern officer stumble, drop his sword and fall to his knees in the grass. An enemy skirmisher ran forward five paces, knelt to take aim, then realized he had left his ramrod behind and went back to find it in the long grass. A riderless horse cantered across the slope. The drummers’ rhythm was more ragged, but still the Northerners came on. A bullet whistled close by Starbuck’s head. One of the Northern bands was playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and the music prickled at Starbuck’s eyes and conscience. ‘Do you not think about girls?’ he asked Adam.

‘No.’ Adam seemed not to be concentrating on the conversation but was staring down the slope. ‘Never.’ His fingers were twitching on the reins.

‘Are you certain you two should be on horseback?’ Major Bird strode over to join Adam and Starbuck. ‘I’d hate to lose you. You heard that young Sparrow died?’ He asked this question of Starbuck.

‘I saw his body, yes.’

‘He should have stayed at home with his mother,’ Major Bird said. His right hand was clawing at his beard, betraying his nerves. ‘Blanche was ridiculously overprotective of that boy, as I discovered when I insisted he was ready to imbibe logarithms. Oh, Christ!’ Major Bird’s imprecation was caused by a sudden volley loosed by the neighboring South Carolinians who were firing over the heads of their own skirmishers. ‘Actually he mastered logs very quickly,’ Bird went on, ‘and he was by far my best pupil for construing Greek. A clever boy, but prone to tears. Highly strung, you see? A waste though, a terrible waste. Why doesn’t war take the illiterates first?’

A fresh artillery battery on the enemy’s right wing had opened fire and one of its shells struck the slope a hundred paces in front of the Legion and ricocheted up into the trees. Starbuck heard the missile rip through the branches overhead. A second shell plunged into the ground close to the skirmish line and there exploded underground to heave the red soil up in a sudden eruption of brown smoke. Some of the skirmishers edged backward.

‘Stand still!’ Truslow bellowed, and not only the skirmishers, but the Legion’s other eight companies froze like rabbits faced by a wildcat. The eight companies at the trees’ edge were in two ranks, the formation suggested by the drill books that Major Pelham and Colonel Faulconer had used in the Legion’s training. The books were American translations of French infantry manuals and recommended that riflemen open fire at long range, then sprint forward to finish off the enemy with bayonet thrusts. Major Bird, who had assiduously studied the manuals, believed they were nonsense. In practice the Legion had never proved accurate when firing their rifles at more than one hundred paces, and Bird did not understand how they were supposed to shake an enemy’s composure with ill-aimed fire at twice that distance followed by a clumsy charge into the teeth of hostile artillery and rifle fire. The Colonel’s airy answer had always been that the men’s natural belligerence would overcome the tactical difficulties, but to Major Bird that seemed a problematical and overoptimistic solution.

‘Permission to open fire?’ Captain Murphy shouted from Company D.

‘Hold your fire!’ Bird had his own opinions about infantry fire. He was convinced that the first volley was the most destructive and should be saved until the enemy was close at hand. He accepted that he had no experience to bolster that opinion, which clashed with the professional doctrine that was taught at West Point and that had been tested in the war against Mexico, but Major Bird refused to believe that soldiering demanded that he entirely suspend the exercise of his intelligence, and so he looked forward to this morning’s test of his theory. Indeed, as he watched the blue-coated ranks advance toward him through the patches of gunsmoke that hung above the meadow, he found himself hoping that Colonel Faulconer did not suddenly reappear to take back the Legion’s command. Major Thaddeus Bird, against all his expectations, was beginning to enjoy himself.

‘Time to open fire, Uncle?’ Adam suggested.

‘I’d like to wait, in fact I will wait.’

The Yankees’ attacking line was losing its order as the attackers paused to fire and reload, then hurried on again. The minié bullets from the Southern skirmishers were causing casualties, and the small roundshots of the two Southern guns were slapping horribly through the attackers’ files to slash quick bloody swathes on the grass and leave wounded men screaming and writhing in agony. The Yankee skirmishers were sniping at their Confederate opposites, but the battle of skirmishers was a sideshow, a mere sop to military theory that insisted that light infantry range ahead of an attack to weaken the defenders with a galling fire. The main Northern attack was coming on too fast and in too much force to need the help of a skirmish line.

Much of the Northern artillery had become unsighted by their own men and had fallen silent, though their howitzers, which fired their missiles high into the air, still lobbed shells over the attackers’ files. Evans’s two guns carried on firing, but Starbuck noted a change in the sound the guns were making and realized they must have changed their ammunition to canister. Canister was a cylindrical tin crammed with musket bullets that burst open at the cannon’s muzzle to hurl a spreading cone of bullets at the enemy, and Starbuck could see the effect of the tin cans by the groups of wounded and dead men snatched backward onto the turf from the attackers’ lines. Drummers were still beating the attack onward and the Northerners were cheering as they advanced, their voices enthusiastic, almost cheerful, as if this whole performance were a sporting contest. The closest American flag was lavishly fringed with gold tassels and so heavy that the standard-bearer seemed to wade forward as though he walked in water. The regiment of regular soldiers had caught up with the attack’s front line and now hurried forward with fixed bayonets for the honor of being the first Federal soldiers to break into the rebel defense.

‘Fire!’ a South Carolinian officer called, and the gray-coated infantry fired a second volley. A ramrod wheeled through the air as the dirty bank of smoke rolled away from the muskets. The Faulconer Legion’s skirmishers were falling back to the regiment’s flanks. The Rhode Islanders’ bayonets looked wickedly long in the smoke-torn sunlight.

‘Take aim!’ Major Bird shouted, and the Legion’s rifles went into their shoulders.

‘Keep your aim low! Keep it low!’ Sergeant Truslow shouted from the left flank.

‘Aim for the officers!’ Captain Hinton, falling back with his skirmishers, shouted.

Starbuck just stared. He could hear a Northern officer shouting his men forward. ‘On, on, on!’ The man had long red side-whiskers and gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘On! On!’ Starbuck could now see the individual characters of the Northern faces. The men’s mouths opened as they shouted, their eyes were wide. A man stumbled, almost dropped his rifle, then regained his balance. The attackers were past the first dead bodies left by the skirmishers. A gold-braided officer mounted on a gray horse dropped his sword to point it straight at the rebels. ‘Charge!’ he shouted, and the attack line quickened into a stumbling run. The Northerners were cheering as they came and the drummers lost all cohesion, simply beating their strides in a frenzy of effort. A fallen color was picked up, its glorious silk stripes a dazzling patch of color in the gray smoke. ‘Charge!’ the Northern officer shouted again, and his horse pranced in the gunsmoke’s skeins.

‘Fire!’ Major Bird screamed, then whooped with unfeigned glee as the Legion’s whole front disappeared in a gout of filthy smoke.

The fusillade was like the crack of doom at the world’s end. It was one sudden, violent, horrifying volley at lethally short range and the shouts and drumming of the attacking Northerners were wiped into instant silence, or rather transmuted into screams and shouts.

‘Reload!’ Murphy shouted.

Nothing could be seen through the bank of powder smoke that twisted above the rail fence. A few enemy bullets whipped through the smoke, but too high. The Legion reloaded, ramming their minié bullets hard down onto powder and wadding.

‘Forward!’ Major Bird was shouting. ‘Take them forward! To the fence, to the fence!’ He was jumping up and down with excitement and waving his unloaded revolver. ‘Forward! Forward!’

Starbuck, still lost in a daze, began to load his revolver again. He was not sure why he did it, or whether he could ever use the weapon, but he just wanted to be doing something, and so he fumbled the powder and bullets into the Savage’s six chambers, then smeared the bullet cones with grease to seal each chamber and thus prevent the ignited powder in the firing chamber setting off the other charges. His hands still shook. In his mind’s eye he could still see that gorgeous banner, all shining red and white, being lifted from the blood-streaked grass to wave again in the sunlight.

‘Fire!’ Sergeant Truslow shouted from the flank.

‘Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards!’ That was Major Bird who, only an hour before, had been ridiculing the idea that he wanted to be involved in the day’s fighting.

‘Aim low! Aim at the bastards’ bellies!’ That was Captain Murphy, who had abandoned his horse and was firing a rifle like his men. The smoke of the first volley thinned to show that the Yankee officer’s gray horse was down in the grass. There were bodies there, puffs of smoke, knots of men.

Adam stayed back at the tree line with Starbuck. He was breathing hard, as though he had just run a race. One of Evans’s small smoothbore cannon fired a barrel of canister down the meadow. A Northern shell whistled fragments above the Legion’s color party. A man reeled back from G Company, blood soaking his left shoulder. He leaned against a tree, breathing hard, and a bullet slapped into the trunk just above his head. The man cursed and pushed himself upright, then stumbled back toward the gun line. Adam, seeing the man’s resolve, pulled his revolver from his holster and urged his horse forward.

‘Adam!’ Starbuck called, remembering his promise to Miriam Faulconer to keep Adam safe, but it was too late. Adam had taken his horse through the bank of bitter gunsmoke, over the fallen fence rails and into the smoke-free air where he was now calmly priming his revolver’s chambers with percussion caps in apparent oblivion of the bullets that whipcracked around him. Some of the Legion’s men shouted warnings that a man on a horse made a much choicer target than a foot soldier, but Adam ignored them.

Instead he leveled the revolver and fired its full cylinder into the enemy’s bank of smoke. He looked almost happy. ‘Forward! Forward!’ he shouted to no one in particular, but a dozen men of the Legion responded by advancing. They knelt close to Adam’s horse and fired blindly at the scattered enemy. The Legion’s first, overwhelming volley had torn the attackers into small groups of blue-uniformed men who stood in a crude line to exchange shots with the gray-clad Southerners. The soldiers’ lips were stained by black powder from biting cartridges and their faces were wild with fear or with rage or with excitement. Adam, his revolver empty, was laughing. Everything was in chaos, nothing but a whirl of smoke and stabbing flame and men screaming defiance. A second line of attackers was advancing up the slope behind the ravaged enemy front line.

‘Forward!’ Major Bird shouted, and groups of men darted a few paces forward, and the enemy edged a few paces backward. Starbuck had joined Adam and was spilling percussion caps from his right hand as he tried to prime the Savage’s six cones. Beside him a man knelt and fired, stood up and reloaded. The man was muttering swear words at the Northerners, cursing their mothers and their children, cursing their past and all their short futures. A Rhode Island officer waved his sword, urging his men on, and a bullet thumped into his belly, bending him over. Sergeant Truslow, grim-faced and silent, was loading his gun with buck and ball, a combination of a round bullet with three smaller buckshots that achieved something of a shotgun effect. He did not fire the charge blindly, but carefully sought a target then fired deliberately, making sure of his aim.

‘Go home! Go home!’ Adam was shouting at the Northerners, the apparently mild words made almost ludicrous by the note of excitement in his voice. He leveled his revolver again, pulled the trigger, but either he had misloaded or forgotten to prime the gun, for nothing happened, but he went on pulling the trigger as he screamed at the invaders to go home. Starbuck, beside his friend, seemed unable to shoot at the flag he had known all his life.

‘Come on, boys! Come on!’ The shout came from the far right of the Confederate line where Starbuck saw the gaudily uniformed Louisiana Zouaves charging out of the powder smoke to carry their bayonet-tipped rifles at the enemy. Some of the Louisianans whirled bowie knives as huge as cutlasses. They advanced raggedly, screaming a terrible high-pitched scream that made Starbuck’s blood run cold. My God, he thought, but the Zouaves would all be cut down, shot in the open field, but instead the Northerners edged back and still farther back, and suddenly the Louisiana infantry were among the blue-coated skirmishers and the Northerners were running for their lives. A bowie knife sliced round and a man fell with his skull streaming blood. Another Northern skirmisher was pinned to the ground with a bayonet as the whole center of the Federal attack line stumbled backward from the bloody Zouave attack, then the rearward movement became a sudden rout as the Northerners fled to avoid the heavy blades. But there was only a handful of Louisiana infantry, and their flanks were open to fire, and suddenly a Northern volley smashed into their ranks. Colonel Wheat went down, his baggy red shirt soaked with blood.

The Louisianans, hugely outnumbered, came to a halt as their enemies’ bullets drove into them. Their gaudy bodies twitched as the bullets struck, but their mad charge had hurled the heart of the Yankee line a good hundred paces back down the hill. But now it was the Zouaves’ turn to go backward and to carry their wounded Colonel toward the trees.

‘Fire!’ a Southern artilleryman shouted and one of the smoothbore cannon belched a belly of canister at the Northerners.

‘Fire!’ Major Bird shouted, and a score of Legion rifles crashed smoke and flame. A boy from Company D rammed a bullet onto a barrel already crammed with three charges of powder and bullets. He pulled the trigger, did not seem to notice that the gun had not fired, and started loading the musket yet again.

‘Fire!’ Nathan Evans screamed, and the South Carolinians smashed a volley across the fence, and in the pastureland the Rhode Islanders shuffled back to leave their dead and wounded bleeding in the grass.

‘Fire!’ A Louisiana chaplain, his Bible forgotten, emptied his revolver at the Yankees, pulling the trigger until the hammer fell on empty chambers, yet still he went on pulling, his face a rictus of exaltation.

‘Fire!’ Truslow shouted at his men. A sixteen-year-old screamed when a cartridge load of powder exploded in his face as he poured it into the hot barrel of his rifle. Robert Decker fired a shotgun into the smoke cloud. The grass of the meadow was flickering with small fires started by the burning wads from the rifle barrels. An injured man crawled back toward the tree line, attempted to clamber over the clutter of fallen fence rails, and there collapsed. His body seemed to shiver, then was still. An officer’s horse lay dead, its body shuddering as Northern bullets thudded home, but the Yankee fire was sporadic as the Rhode Islanders, too frightened to stand still and reload properly, stepped backward. The rebels screamed defiance and spat bullets into hot barrels, rammed the charges hard home, pulled their triggers, then started the process again. Starbuck watched the Legion fight its first battle and was struck by the atmosphere of glee, of sheer release, of carnival enjoyment. Even their soldiers’ screams sounded to Starbuck like the mad whoops of overexcited children. Groups of men were darting forward, emulating the Zouaves’ charge, and driving the demoralized Rhode Islanders farther back down the long slope where the first Yankee charge had been stopped cold.

Yet a second Yankee attack line was already halfway up the slope and still more Northern troops were coming from the Sudley Road. A U.S. Marine regiment was there, together with three fresh regiments of New York volunteers. More field guns appeared, and the first Yankee cavalry galloped off to the left of their line as the fresh Northern infantry marched stoically into the open land to reinforce the ragged remnants of the first attack, which had retreated two hundred paces back from the litter of bodies and the line of slick bloody grass and scorched turf that marked the high-tide line of their first failed assault.

‘Form line! Form line!’ The shout started somewhere in the center of the Confederate formation, and somehow enough sane officers and sergeants heard the order and echoed it, and slowly the screaming, maddened rebels were brought back to the fence line. They were grinning and laughing, full of pride for what they had done. Every now and then a man would whoop for no apparent reason, or else a man might turn around to blast a bullet at the stalled Northern attack. Insults were hurled down the long slope.

‘Go back to your mothers, Yankees!’

‘Send some real men next time!’

‘So how do you like a Virginia welcome, you yellow bastards!’

‘Silence!’ Major Bird shouted. ‘Silence!’

Someone began laughing, a hysterical mad laugh. Someone else cheered. At the foot of the slope the Northern guns opened fire again, screaming their shells up to the ridge to blast apart in dark-flamed smoke. The short-barreled Northern howitzers had never ceased to fire, lobbing spherical case shot high over the Rhode Islanders and New Yorkers to crash raggedly about the edge of the woods.

‘Back to the trees! Back to the trees!’ The order was repeated down the rebel line and the Southerners retreated back into the shadows. In front of them, where the powder smoke cleared slowly from the burnt grass, a handful of bodies lay on either side of the remnants of rail fence while beyond the fence, in the brighter sunlight, a scattering of dead Northerners was sprawled in the pasture. The officer with red side-whiskers lay there with his mouth open and his gold-rimmed spectacles half-fallen off his face. A crow flapped down to land near the man’s body. A wounded Northerner pulled himself toward the trees, asking for water, but no one in the Legion had any water. They had emptied their canteens and now the sun was beating hotter and their mouths were dried by the saltpeter in the gunpowder, but there was no water, and ahead of them were yet more Yankees coming from the far trees to reignite the attack.

‘We’ll do it to them again, boys! We’ll do it to them again!’ Major Bird shouted, and even though the chaos of the Legion’s first fight had not given him a chance to fully test his theory of musketry, he suddenly knew he had achieved something far more valuable; he had discovered an activity he utterly enjoyed. For all of his adult life Thaddeus Bird had been faced with the classic dilemma of a poor relation, which was whether to show an eternal deferential gratitude or to demonstrate an independency of mind by cultivating a prickly opposition to every prevailing orthodoxy, which latter course had pleased Bird until, in the smoke and excitement of battle, there had been no need to posture. Now he paced behind his men, watching the new Northern attack take shape, and felt strangely content. ‘Load your guns,’ he called in a firm voice, ‘but hold your fire! Load your guns, but hold your fire.’

‘Go for their bellies, boys,’ Murphy called aloud. ‘Put them down hard and the rest will go home.’

Adam, like his uncle, also felt as though a great weight had gone from his soul. The awful noise of the battle spelt the death of all that he had worked for in the months since Lincoln’s election, but the terrible sound also meant that Adam was no longer concerned with the great issues of war and peace, of slavery and emancipation, of states’ rights and Christian principle, but only with being a good neighbor to the men who had volunteered to serve his father. Adam even began to understand his father, who had never agonized over morality or wanted to weigh up the balance of his actions in an earnest attempt to guarantee a favorable verdict on the Day of Judgment. Once, when Adam had asked his father about the principles by which he lived his life, Washington Faulconer had simply laughed the question away. ‘You know your trouble? You think too much. I’ve never known a happy man who thought too much. Thinking just complicates affairs. Life’s like jumping a bad fence on a good horse, the more responsibility you leave to the horse the safer you’ll be, and the more you leave to life the happier you are. Worrying about principles is schoolmaster’s talk. You’ll just find you sleep better if you treat people naturally. It ain’t principle, just practicality. I never could stand listening to cant about principle. Just be yourself!’ And Adam, in the sudden splintering chaos of a firefight, had at last trusted the horse to take the jump, and discovered that all his agony of conscience had evaporated in the simple pleasure of doing his duty. Adam, in a meadow whipsawed by fire, had behaved well. He might have lost the battle for his country, but he had won the war in his soul.