Confederates (21 page)

‘Well, the other rules is merest horse-sense. Single out an individual adversary for your fire, some man you never met but you were destined to make inroads in his life. Pick off the enemy's officers, particularly the ones like me who are mounted. Because it might strike you, by observing the poor servant of the Confederacy who sits mounted before you right now, that it's generally field officers who sit on horseback. If you can pick off the artillery, get their goddam horses. If you get their horses, they can't get the cannon away when you advance, as advance you will, sure as the Trinity an twice as slick!'

Some of the boys, Usaph could see, even held Bibles in their hands while they gave ear to Wheat's profane speech. All his blaspheming on the edge of the battlefield took away the breath of the godly and diverted the ungodly from the mortal danger in which they stood.

But there was more noise now from batteries on the other side of the road and lots of Ewell's boys seemed to be firing off their muskets over there. The colonel looked around him, like a parson who knows he might not have time to polish off his sermon before the roof of the chapel falls in.

‘Any man who pauses in battle for the purpose of plundering the dead deserves the bullet he shall assuredly get, if not from a Yankee then from me. Do not heed the call of wounded friends. If they can holler it's likely they ain't too bad and that therefore they call out in mere shock. Details have been made to pick up the wounded and your best way to protect your friend is to drive his enemy clear off the field. That's flat. Do your duty, boys, in a way that becomes the heroic example your regiment has gone and set on other battlefields. Remember that the enemy you engage has no feeling of mercy. His ranks are made up of Indians, lovers of nigras, Southern Tories, Kansas Jayhawkers and hired Dutch cut-throats. These bloody ruffians have invaded your country, stolen and destroyed your property, murdered your neighbours, outraged your women, driven your little'uns from their homes and defiled the graves of your kindred. Do you gentlemen need to be told what to do?'

There was a yell from the regiment. ‘Whe-hee-hee-hew!' It was a wild tribal sound that rasped the blood and cleared out of your ears the echoes of the cannon.

Cate of course abstained from this yelling. All the time he secretly watched Bumpass, wishing him dead yet wishing him also to be safer than any other man on that field. Look at me, goddamit! I can't be avoided, Usaph Bumpass! But Bumpass did not notice him.

Through a minute view down past the distant forest, Usaph saw blue skirmishers way over beyond the road making their way in a firm but wide-spaced line down from their ridge to the banks of Cedar Run.

Gus had seen them too, though probably no one else but the two of them in the whole regiment were so angled as to get this glimpse.

‘I jest mention it again,' said Gus. ‘About my notes. You know the man to send them to, Usaph?'

Those music notes that Gus carried in his blankets were his will and his goddam inheritance. Usaph nodded. ‘Dr Jerro in Lexington.'

‘Dr Guerreaux,' said Gus.

‘There can't be more than one Dr Jerro in Lexington.'

‘I just mention it. I know you ain't so good at Frenchy names,' said Gus. He spat some phlegm. ‘If you sent them to my ma, she jest wouldn't know what to do with them.'

‘Look, Gus, goddamit it!' said Usaph, remembering that you shouldn't say
goddamit
before a battle. Only colonels could get away with that. ‘The same deal is on, boy, as ever.'

It was just the deal to search for each other after the conflict if a search was neeeded. You couldn't trust what the colonel had said about the ambulance details. They were never too numerous and most of them weren't outstanding for their devotion. And that was the worst fear of all – to be bundled nameless into the earth with a heap of other dead boys whose names were unknown to you. And then no one ever knew where
you
were lying. So that no woman could ever know that mound by
your
name or honour it with blossoms. So that no one for the rest of time knew what your injuries and agonies had been, and whether you went with a look of acceptance on your face, or flinching, or with a sort of frozen scream upon your features.

‘The same deal,' Gus said, coughing. Not worried. Just wanting the question settled.

The sick young general, Charlie Winder, had arrived at Brynam's battery and was standing behind Puckett's and Maskill's guns, talking to Captain Brynam and looking with him through binoculars at the Federal ridge. Now and then he would make a suggestion about elevation or ask what charge was being used. He had his coat off, it was slung over the front of the saddle of his horse, which stood back near the gun teams.

Through all the racket Orville Puckett could hear snatches of the general's words, even though they came out laboured and wheezing. The general was sweating, but he seemed professional in his head.

‘Percussion fuse … that Number 3 gun's a little … elevation … 1.5 would do it, wouldn't you say?'

It seemed the Rockbridge was having some success against that far ridge, and now Yankee batteries began to bear in closer and harder on it. The whistling of some shells seemed to Puckett to be very intimately intended for his own gun and crew.

‘… rifled pieces,' Puckett heard the general calling.

‘That's right, that's right,' Puckett started muttering, though no one could hear him. ‘Rifled pieces.'

He hated that shrieking they made. The rifled shells had lead sabots at their base and the gases of the explosion in the barrel flattened these to the limits of the bore, and the rifling made little flutes and grooves in the lead, which then screamed thus as the shell tore a hole in the hot afternoon air.

So there were engineering reasons for that fierce noise, but it didn't ever sound just like engineering. It sounded as if it had been personally arranged by Satan.

Since the gun was well sighted in, and since the gun-crew were now working blind in the dust to get off three rounds a minute or even four, Puckett, crazy with the noise and gagging from dust and cramp, worked democratically a little way back from the gun, at the limber box. A boy called Moore would take the linen-cased charge out of the one limber chest and Orville would take the fuse out of the other and screw it, deft and quick, into the nose of the shell. Behind him, behind the limbers and caissons and the horse-teams, the shells of the Union were exploding in the maples and oaks and hickories.

Glancing back for an instant in between fitting fuses, Orville saw branches falling. As yet the success of those Yankee artillery sergeants over there was limited to foliage. They would get results though, here by the road, either amongst the horses or amongst the guns, just by a touch of their elevation screws. Or a little variation in the powder charge would take care of it. They were likely twiddling the screws and doing their mental arithmetic right now.

Puckett heard General Charlie Winder yelling more than an ill man should, and looked around. The general was pointing off towards the Yankee slope. Then he pointed to Puckett's gun and Maskill's, but the noise both sides of the road was too steady for him to be heard.

‘Give the general my respects,' Puckett screamed like a sane man to young Moore, ‘and ask him would he mind telling you what he said?'

Young Moore went running across towards the place Winder stood. The general was all crooked about the shoulders with the effort of yelling and thinking and waiting. His face was a bilious white which dust and powder smoke hadn't changed. Moore saw him put his right hand up to his mouth to shout the order again. Puckett too, inspecting the fuse in the next round, had half an eye on the general in that instant when a 3-inch shell, well-tooled in the armories of the North, came down beneath Charles Winder's raised arm.

Then the general was there on his back on the ground. Puckett was horrified. A general on the ground! A general on the ground hadn't got any authority. Winder's side was all meat, and fibres of his white shirt were mixed in with the blood and the grey organs which stood all exposed. No one's safe, thought Puckett. No one is safe here. He wanted to run, and even took a few quick steps south before something in him stopped the movement.

The general's body fluttered on the ground just like the shock had given him a fit. He had raised his left hand and the second finger and thumb were together, as if Charlie Winder, who had a reputation as a scholar, was trying to define something to himself. One of Winder's aides and young Moore as well were fussing about him with a blanket. Sergeant Pat Maskill didn't seem to have noticed what had happened to the general. He screamed and pointed to the enemy's ridge. ‘They're all changing position!' he yelled. He saw that Orville was standing helpless. He himself detailed Moore and four other boys from the gun teams to lock arms and carry the mangled general back to the field surgery along Culpeper Road. It had to be done, though everyone could see the man was beyond help from surgeons.

It had happened at the worst of times. The rite of battle had got going properly now. Jackson was waiting half a mile down the road from the place Winder had gone down. He was still in the saddle, and Sandie and Kyd, Hotchkiss and the surgeon Maguire were with him. They'd all just been watching Early's boys go down to the banks of the stream where the Union cannon had started into them, putting them on the ground, junking them.

Now Winder's aide rode up with
this
news. Tom Jackson kept a long silence, staring now and then at the aide as if he were thinking, this man's lying and if I turn on him full force he could be made to admit it.

‘Well,' he said in the end, as if he'd been hunting around in his mind for the best words to say, ‘I expect God takes the best to stop us getting too ecstatic about war.'

All his staff put on sombre faces as if everyone was going to sit round in their saddles for at least a minute mourning young Charlie Winder. Instead of that, without saying a word about what his ideas were or his plans, Tom Jackson spurred Ole Sorrel across the main road, fair through the middle of one of Ambrose Hill's regiments. They were North Carolina boys marching into the woods to support dead Winder's regiments. They had to halt all of a sudden and step back on the toes of the men behind them, and there was some profanity about this. Sandie and Kyd and Doctor Maguire came on behind the General. They heard the cuss words of the infantry. But Tom Jackson himself was way ahead.

He couldn't know for certain but he had this feeling from what had happened to Early's boys that, over on Winder's front, beyond the place where the Stonewall Brigade and the Shenandoah Volunteers waited, in a great triangle of woods, things might be going to the devil.

The General was halfway across a meadow on his way towards the Stonewall when there were all at once running boys all around him. Their mouths were open, their jackets were – he noticed – good grey cloth. Green boys.

‘Who are they, Sandie?' he asked.

Sandie yelled: ‘An Alabama brigade. Fresh up from Selma.'

‘Stop them,' said Tom Jackson.

Sandie wheeled his horse to try to obey that preposterous order. It seemed that Banks had just opened the Confederate line like a book, and would now force it back on its binding, break it apart at its spine. ‘Kyd,' Tom Jackson roared. ‘The Stonewall. Over there in a meadow. Tell them to go forward.' His brain kept singing
Kernstown, Kernstown
, because at Kernstown they'd done the same thing to him.

Kyd kicked his horse and went up the funnel of fleeing Alabamans and Virginians, always nearly colliding with some stark-eyed boy who didn't seem to see him. Kyd could feel those strange vibrations in the air that come when the atmosphere is thickly sewn with minie balls, so many you just couldn't worry about them. He thought, it happens at the moment I'm the only creature in the Confederacy who's going in anything like a northerly direction. He saw an officer here and there talking to a clump of men, detaining someone by an elbow, trying to get this or that boy to focus on him. Saying, we can make a line here. But the men always seemed to drift off, or get washed away. And it was beginning to rain.

Back by the road, Tom Jackson got out his sword, something he hadn't done since a dress parade a year back. He yelled to the drifting men all round him. ‘Here! Here, boys! Get together here. Go forward with Jackson. Come on, go forward with Jackson.'

But it was more than the old-fashioned and gallant lines he said. It was the speciality of his aura. Even in that noise and in all the dust not yet settled by this spit of raindrops, men some fifty yards away from him were held up by the wild prophet's eyes that he laid on them as his horse spun round and round like an Italian ringmaster's. ‘Here, boys, Jackson will lead you. Who'll go with me, eh?'

He'd never once behaved like this before, like a general in an opera. An officer nearby was ordering boys into line. The boys who'd been stopped by the sort of waves Tom Jackson gave off.

Sandie Pendleton rode up to him from one side, big Bill Telfer from the other. They were both yelling good news at once. Their voices made one long sentence of good news. ‘Thirty-seventh in good order … Tenth holding the flank … Hill's Second Brigade gone in over the road …' And all round the General boys had made a line, all roaring and cussing at the tops of their voices, beasts just wanting to let their rage out, nearly all of them moving their lips, snarling. Jackson knew that men enraged like beasts were a gift to a general. Yet men in a Christian state were never meant to be enraged like beasts. Out of tensions and contradictions like this came the Lord's great day of justification and judgement.

Big General Telfer had his horse just five paces from Old Sorrel. He could see the battle had nearly gone to the other side once already this afternoon because of a general's death. He didn't want another death, not Stonewall's. Why he feared being bereaved again was that if Stonewall was shot, the whole Confederate left, everything this side of the road, would be in his, in Bill Telfer's hands; and that idea terrified him, the idea of being promoted twice in an afternoon.