Confederates (40 page)

Pop-eyed General Ewell came striding up from the place he'd been keeping near the far fence. ‘What in God's name you all putting away there?'

‘Buttermilk, sir.'

‘Why goddamit, offer me some!' For buttermilk would be kindly with his jangled guts. Either because he needed to or thought he needed to, little hawk-nosed General Ewell ate nothing but cereal and the occasional luxury of fruit. It didn't seem to impair his energies any. But be believed buttermilk would make a big difference to him today. Charlie Blackford offered to go and get some. He took Ewell's orderly, a tall boy, along with him and the two troopers that had gone before, and a few more as well that had been slumped round about. When they neared the farm this time, they spotted five horses hitched right outside the door. Blackford sent two of the troopers across the fields and round to the back door and then charged from the direction of the road with his three other men. Five Yankees came spilling down the steps of the farmhouse and Charlie Blackford and the others spurred up, and four of the five surrendered straight off. The fifth ran, being fired at; and while his small force kept the prisoners tidy, Charlie ran indoors and began filling canteens with buttermilk and dragging hot cakes off the table into a flour bag he'd brought with him for the purpose. The farmer and his wife weren't to be seen so he just nodded with a sort of crazy politeness towards the interior of the house and ran. He was just mounting his horse when firing started from the woods a hundred paces west of the farmhouse. He and the others rode off crouched, trying not to be sacrifices to Dick Ewell's taste for buttermilk. They drove the four Yankees before them. But after a few hundred paces, when the firing heated up, Charlie yelled: ‘Let the prisoners go in the rear with me.'

So it was done and Blackford got back to Ewell with buttermilk.

Now there were these boys from Indiana to question – they were the flank guard of the whole Union army. They fought in a war where it was thought of as all right if a prisoner told what he knew, and after they had done so, they were escorted over the ridge, through the resting army, down to the quiet valley beyond, where Jackson's waggon train was drawn up.

It was deep in that summer's afternoon, when the sun hung unremittingly in the western quarter of the sky, that a courier came in from Lee. Lee and Longstreet, said the courier, were at Thoroughfare Gap and although there was some opposition, mainly from cavalry, they meant to cross in the morning.

Tom Jackson got up now in a smiling state and began to talk to Telfer and Ewell, grinning at them more than he'd grinned at anyone since Easter.

Half an hour later, by climbing the corner of a fence in the farmyard, the three generals were able to see a Union division strung out and swinging along the main pike just a little way down the hill. They moved smartly and willingly, like boys who had never been marched a terrible distance in all their military career.

Up in the fringe of woods above Stonewall, Usaph and the others could also see this division moving along nicely in the dusk. Although officers came along telling boys to hush, Usaph didn't think that force down there signified much. For the sun was already low.

The Yankee boys saw a few lean Confederate horsemen atop a ridge a half a mile in from the road. They'd been seeing distant Rebel horsemen all day. These two looked, with the last sunlight of the day behind them, as lean and starved as the rest. Yet it gave you a strange feeling in the gut to see Rebels riding up and down like that, like the scarecrow proprietors of the farm of death. But the sun was low and soon everyone would camp and boil up his coffee.

On the ridge, Tom Jackson patted his horse. He said to Sandie: ‘How do they look to you, Sandie? D'they look like messengers, would you say?'

Sandie barely knew what Tom Jackson was talking about, but grinned as if he did. He followed the General when that mysterious gentleman turned Ole Sorrel's head fiercely and galloped back down to the farmyard.

Telfer and Ewell were still rubber-necking like boys at a ballgame from their corner of the field at the passing Yankees. Tom Jackson reined in by Telfer.

‘Move your division out of the woods, down towards the pike.'

‘And do I attack, Tom?'

‘You do. The lead brigade.'

‘And me, Tom?' Popeye Ewell asked, fortified by buttermilk.

‘You support his attack on the left.'

It was a characteristic Jackson battle conference, all over in the space of a few grunts.

The leading Union brigade on the pike belonged to a brigade called Gibbon's Black Hat Brigade of Rufus King's division. They were certainly proud but had never fought before today. This evening it seemed that God had been saving this hour specially for them. For if they looked at the sunset one minute, there was nothing but a proper golden radiance above a black line of forest. And the next there were batteries galloping out into the open to get an uninterrupted line of fire on them, and there were long lines of men, who didn't seem any better dressed or any more rushed than labourers, moving out of the woods up there on that ridge.

2

They sent Usaph and the others down the slope from the woods, and you could see the Yankees were already flinging themselves down on the road and then being urged into an upright position by their officers. The Rockbridge began its firing and Yankee artillery in plain sight answered from meadows beyond the road.

Then it was all lost from sight to Usaph and the others. A low ridge, the ridge where Tom Jackson had ridden a few minutes ago, put itself between the road and Usaph. In fact, Usaph guessed it ran for more than a thousand yards, and as if guessing that those neat Wisconsin boys might charge it, General Telfer got the Stonewall Brigade to halt there, right in front of it. Any Yankees coming over it would be lit by the evening sun.

Just the same the idea didn't suit the boys, you could feel their desire to be let loose. They still suffered from the crazy belief that from now on it would all be like the feast at Manassas.

Usaph stood by Gus and Gus had his ear lifted to the whine of the shells above his head. Talk started up, but Gus said nothing. Looking down the line, Usaph saw Cate staring at him. God, you might damn well lose those eyes in ten minutes! Usaph thought with a savage lift of his soul. For all the martial demons were on Usaph at times like this, and one thing it did for him was he could see each blade of grass as a separate wonder, even in a little sump like this where the light wasn't good, and he could see and number each wisp of evening cloud and remember its lines all his days.

Hans Strahl, who wasn't so talkative at the best of times, had chosen now to be telling a story to Ash Judd, who listened with a sort of grinning composure for which only he himself knew the reason.

‘You know how these-here Springfield muskets are so goddam well made,' said Hans, studiously sounding like a native-born Valley boy, ‘that an Irishman in the 5th Virginia was able to carry whisky in the barrel of one all the way from Manassas last evening to this very place.…'

Young Lucius Taber and the fierce dentist, Captain Guess, were going about hissing ‘Silence!' But no one obeyed, they just chatted a little lower.

‘And when he sat down by the road early this morning,' Hans pursued, ‘to have a draught of it, he had to put the barrel in his mouth. And ain't it jest what you'd expect that the chaplain of the 5th came along then, and he'd have to be one of them priests of the Irish type, the 5th being all Irish. And he sees this here boy with his gun in his mouth and one hand on the barrel and the other down near the trigger and he yells: “Don't do it, Paddy. Jaysus'll see you through!”'

Usaph noticed that there were boys, as there always were, leafing through the scriptures, but it was too late for him to do that; he'd left his in his blanket roll up the hill. Also he guessed that if he touched a scripture at a time like this he'd lose his call on those war-hungry devils that got into him at times like these. And without those devils, he couldn't face fire.

Before there was time for him to raise any sort of envy for those boys who, while cool and scared and reading the Book, still stood waiting to face the enemy, a line of neat boys appeared atop the rise fair ahead. They looked like well-shaped farm boys – and from their corpses it would be found that their origins were in Wisconsin and Indiana, and that they came from no Irish or German sink in Manhattan or Boston.

They were no more than a hundred steps off. Without waiting from any advice from an officer, Usaph shot the one his eyes fixed on full in the body. He had turned into something like an animal now, though there was a Christian left somewhere inside him to lament that fact at a later time. Why, a friend – even Gus – could be shot between the eyes and it'd be midnight before Usaph was human again and mourned him and the waste of his talents. God, he felt so expert, firing uphill didn't worry him even a little. He was some marksman and so were all the rest! And the Yankee boys went on presenting themselves over that ridge. Who was their commander and what did he mean by serving them up like this?

Bumpass, the war animal, fired four rounds before the Union colonels got over their craziness and stopped despatching boys over that small rise. There was a stillness then, apart from the artillery firing which, though loud, somehow wasn't Usaph's business. Usaph looked at Gus; Gus smiled. From the rise came thin cries, a true babble you could barely make out the bits of. There was a boy up there, though, calling, ‘By Jesus, Andy, I'm hurt,' in a straightforward voice like a man commenting on the weather.

One of those delays set in and what ended it was the order to go forward at a trot, over the ridge. The Yankee boys up there on their backs and bellies, putting their hands out for kindness, meant nothing to frothing and trembling Usaph Bumpass. They had no rights. They'd been swept off the table of contents of this battle.

Beyond the rise was a long rail fence and the Yankees had pulled the uprights from it. The last Yankee runners who had lived through that advance were being pulled back into the ranks down there by the road, into the warm comfort of the jostling shoulders of their kin. The Stonewall went on walking through another desecrated fence, and stopped just a hundred paces from the road. Later, Usaph could not remember any order to halt given at that stage, but maybe there was. It seemed to him as if a halt came because the brigade had come to some unspoken animal agreement about how close was the right thing.

In fact, General Telfer thought they'd already gone too far, and the instincts of such colonels as Lafcadio Wheat told them any closer was ridiculous.

Where Usaph and Gus and the others stood, it was an open field, unploughed, and there was bluegrass up to the calves of tall boys like Usaph himself, and the knees of shorter ones like Danny Blalock.

Tom Jackson watched from his farmyard at the edge of the forest. He could foresee lots of maimings and deaths in the way the two lines of boys were facing each other off, but he didn't expect the lines to hold like that too long. He'd send Kyd off to the south to tell a Confederate brigade camped down there by a quiet stream near the Manassas Gap railroad line to hurry round from that direction, cross the road, and roll up the Yankee flank in the normal way.

Tom Jackson, believing he had God's firm approval, didn't think how little this sort of move had worked lately.

Kyd, riding with the order, found the country very broken down that way. He had to ride through ravines where the suckers and undergrowth were up to his shoulders, and his horse would panic and vines would get him by the throat. Four ticks got down Kyd's collar during that ride. There were deep woods too that muffled the noise of the crazy actions down by the road, and night had just about arrived.

The brigade Kyd was trying to find was under the command of General Bill Telfer's cousin, Alex. It was close on eight p.m. before Kyd, no longer a neat and cool aide, but a sweating, tick-infested, irascible boy, collided with some of cousin Alex's pickets and got the message delivered. It was willingly obeyed.

But the same country that had made a fool of Kyd caused this brigade to tangle itself in the ravines and thickets. This company or that kept following the noise of the conflict to the north and stumbled into the meadows behind the Union line, where they could do nothing but snipe.

So the event as Stonewall could see it at its start wasn't changed all evening. Two long lines of boys stood up to each other so close that the artillery of either side couldn't join in any more for fear of striking their brethren.

The Reverend Dignam coolly perceived what a filthy thing it was for two lines to be placed so close like this. He walked down just behind the long string of riflemen. No one looked back at him. It was crazy. Half these boys might run in circumstances not half so dangerous as these. But even the conscripts were standing here, labouring away like mill hands in the great factory of battle.

Sometimes the Reverend Dignam, keeping his cool Christian head in the midst of his promenade, would be bumped by a boy reeling back from the line open-mouthed and grabbing with both hands a pulped eye or a punctured skull, or holding a shattered arm out from the body and looking at it with that gaping, protesting mouth the wounded put on. And sometimes boys would kneel down, as he approached, like tired children falling on to their haunches, and then their heads would go right down in an Eastern salaam, and their hindquarters would point to the sky.

Lafcadio Wheat was standing back some fifteen paces behind Company D. His headquarters was a patch of lupins; the flowers were a nice radiant blue this time of day. He had an orderly with him and Company D's young captain was sitting by his feet. The boy was staring down at his own hand, which lay in his lap. The boy's thumb had been shot away and all the pad of the hand too.

‘This is madness, Laffie,' Dignam screamed at Colonel Wheat. The colonel grimaced and lifted his ear, meaning he hadn't heard … ‘Madness!' the Reverend Dignam screamed again. ‘We must get them away from here. Back to that rise. Lay them down. Just over the crest. We should …'