The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (33 page)

"Why?" Delaney asked, then hastily added, "I'm curious, sir," in case the General thought he was challenging his decision.

Lee shrugged. "We invaded the North, Delaney. Are we to slink away with nothing accomplished?"

"We captured Harper's Ferry, sir," Delaney pointed out.

"So we did, so we did, but we set out to do a great deal more. We came north, Delaney, to inflict hurt on the enemy and that we still have to do. I had planned to inflict that pain well north of here, but I confess General McClellan has surprised me, so now I must hurt him here rather than on the Susquehanna. But here or there, what matters is to hurt him so badly that the North cannot invade us again, and Europe will see that we can defend ourselves and are thus worthy of their support. Hurt them once, Delaney, and there's a chance we'll not have to inflict pain again, but if we just slip away then McClellan will follow and we shall have to fight him on our own soil. And poor Virginia has suffered enough, God knows." The General spoke softly, rehearsing his arguments out loud, and always conscious that Belvedere Delaney carried weight in Richmond's political circles. If things went badly in the next few hours then it would be as well to have a man like Delaney retailing the General's motives to the Confederacy's leaders.

"McClellan outnumbers us," Delaney said, unable to hide his nervousness.

"He does indeed, but he always has," Lee answered dryly, "though this time, I confess, his preponderance is significant. We guess he has eighty thousand men. We have less than twenty." He paused, smiling at the outrageous imbalance. "But Jackson's men are marching toward us. We might line up thirty thousand against him."

"Thirty?" Delaney was appalled at the odds.

Lee chuckled. "Poor Delaney. You really would be happier in Richmond, I think? It would do you no dishonor to leave us. Your work here is surely
doner'

Better than you know, Delaney thought, but answered instead with a quotation from Shakespeare. " 'The fewer men, the greater share of honor.'"

Lee smiled, recognizing Shakespeare's line from Henry V. "A few men beat a great army in that battle," he said, "and I do know one thing about these men," he gestured with a bandaged hand at his ragged troops in their bivouacs. "They are the best fighting men, Delaney, that this poor world has ever seen. They make me feel humble. Wars might be won by strategy, but battles are won by morale, and if you and I, my friend, should live to be a hundred we shall never see troops as good as these. McClellan is nervous of them, very nervous, and tomorrow he has to attack them and he will do it gingerly. And if he is as cautious as I expect, then we shall have a chance to tear his army into pieces."

Delaney shuddered at the thought of battle. "He hasn't been cautious these last few days, sir," he said warningly.

Lee nodded. "He got wind of our dispositions. We don't know how, but some sympathizers at Frederick sent us a message telling us that McClellan was boasting that he had us in the bag. Well, so he did, but it's one thing to have a bag and it's quite another to stuff the wildcat inside the bag. Believe me, Delaney, his caution will return. It already has returned! If I was across that river I wouldn't be bivouacking now. I'd be pushing brigades over the valley, I'd be thrusting hard, I'd be fighting, but McClellan is waiting, and every hour that he waits brings Jackson's men closer to us."

But even when Jackson's men came, Delaney thought, Lee's army would be less than half the size of McClellan's. The rebellion was surely doomed and Delaney, rejoicing in that thought and in the part he had played in the destruction, still felt a regret for Lee. The General was a good man, a very good and honorable man, but Lee had no ambassadorships in his pocket and so Delaney prayed that on the morrow he would watch the Confederacy die in the ripe fields beside the Antietam.

Tuesday, September 17,
dawned hot and sultry. The Con
federate pickets, warned of an enemy attack, stared across the river through a heavy fog that slowly lightened as
the sun rose above the Red Hill.
The pickets feared the blast of cannons loaded with canister and the splashing of men carrying bayonets and loaded rifles through the river's fords, but no such attack came. McClellan, if he did but know it, had succeeded in the dearest wish of all fighting generals: He had trapped his enemy's army while it was split into two parts, and if McClellan had lunged across the stream he could have destroyed Lee's small army, then marched against Jackson's scattered men as they hurried north from Harper's Ferry.

But McClellan did not move. He waited.

The sun burned the last of the fog from the creek and nervous rebel pickets stared across the water at green leaves from which the smoke of campfires drifted gently. Confederate cavalry reconnoitered the Antietam's banks north and south of Lee's position, but no Northern troops were attempting the crossing, nor, astonishingly, were any Northern cavalry making similar patrols in the drowsy, heavy countryside. There were Yankee troops marching, but those men formed the tail of McClellan's huge army as it crossed the hills toward the Antietam's eastern bank. The sixty thousand Yankees became seventy-five thousand and still McClellan did not advance. He waited.

He waited just two and a half miles east of the Dunker church, on the Yankee bank of the Antietam, in the Pry family farmhouse. The farm had a substantial house, ample barns, and well-drained fields that sloped from the Red Hill down to the creek's banks. Most of the fields were stubble now, though some were tall with corn that was almost ready to be harvested. One meadow was stacked with hay, a second had a fine crop of clover, while the higher fields had just been plowed for the planting of winter wheat. Yankees were bivouacked in all the meadows and had torn down the haystacks to make their mattresses. Some played baseball, some wrote home, others lay reading in whatever shade they could discover on this hot, humid day. Once in a while a man would peer through the trees at the distant line of rebel guns crowning the western skyline, but until they received orders to attack they were content to rest. Little Mac would see them right. The newspapers might call McClellan the Young Napoleon, but to the Northern soldiers he was always Little Mac and the one thing they knew and loved in Little Mac was that he would never risk their lives unnecessarily. They trusted him, and so they were content to wait.

Colonel Thorne was not content. At dawn he was riding his horse down the Antietam toward the Potomac, and by the time the fog had lifted he had marked a half dozen crossing places on his map. He had attempted to cross one ford and been repelled by an alarmed shout from a gray-clad picket who had hastily cocked his rifle and fired a wild shot that whipped over
Thorne
's head. Further upstream he had watched a stone bridge and tried to count the number of rebels dug into their rifle pits on its far side. He saw them go down to the creek to fill their canteens, watched them wash, and listened to their laughter.

Now, as the morning dragged somnolently onward, he discovered General McClellan comfortably ensconced in the Pry house. Telegraphers were running wire up the hill to a signal station on the Red Hill's summit from where messages would be semaphored by relay stations until another telegraph station could send McClellan's news to Washington. One message already waited to be sent and
Thorne
, discovering the telegraphers setting up their equipment in the Pry's parlor, picked it up. "This morning a heavy fog has thus far prevented us doing more than ascertain that some of the enemy are still there," the message read. "Do not know in what force. Will attack as soon as situation of the enemy develops."
Thorne
snorted as he dropped the message. You don't wait for the enemy, he thought. My God, but Adam Faulconer had died to put the Northern army into this place and all

McClellan needed to do was order his troops forward. Those troops were in high enough spirits. They had chased the rebels off the mountain passes and rumors were whipping through the Northern ranks that Lee was wounded, maybe dead, and so were Jackson and Longstreet. The troops were willing enough to fight, but McClellan was waiting for the situation of the enemy to develop, whatever that meant. Thorne strode out of the parlor to discover the General sitting in one of a number of well-upholstered armchairs that had been placed on the lawn to give a view of the ground across the river. A telescope stood on a tripod beside the General, while in front of the armchairs, on the lawn, which sloped steeply downhill, a barricade had been erected from fence rails and tree branches. The barricade suggested that McClellan believed he might have to make his last stand here on the farmhouse lawn, firing his revolver from the comfort of an armchair while his defeated troops streamed past on either side.

"I have been south," Thorne said abruptly. McClellan, chatting with Pinkerton, who occupied the armchair next to his, had pointedly ignored the Colonel's arrival and so Thorne simply butted in.

"South where?" McClellan finally asked.

"South down the creek, sir. There are fords there, and none of them properly guarded by the rebels. One had a picket, but only a handful of men. The best crossing is at Snaveley's Ford." Thorne held out his notebook in which he had penciled a crude map. "Cross there, sir, and within a mile we'll have cut off Lee's retreat."

McClellan nodded, but otherwise seemed to take no notice of
Thorne
's words.

"For God's sake, sir,"
Thorne
said, "attack now! Lee can't have twenty thousand men under arms."

"Nonsense." McClellan was goaded into the argument.

"Believe that, Colonel, and you'll believe anything." He laughed and his aides sniggered dutifully.

"Sir," Thorne deliberately made his voice respectful. "We know when Harper's Ferry surrendered, sir, and we know that Jackson's troops cannot have reached Sharpsburg yet. No troops can cover that distance that fast, but if we wait till this evening, sir, they'll be here. Then Lee will have forty or fifty thousand men waiting for us."

"General Lee," McClellan said icily, "has eighty thousand men already. Eighty thousand!" His voice rose in indignation. "And if this benighted government saw fit to provide me with the men necessary to prosecute a successful war I would already have attacked, but I cannot attack until I know, with utter certainty, the enemy's dispositions!"

"The enemy's disposition, sir, is desperate!" Thorne insisted. "They're tired, they're hungry, they're outnumbered, and in three hours, sir, you can have a victory as complete as any in history."

McClellan shook his head in anger, then glanced at Allan Pinkerton, who slouched low in his flower-printed armchair. He wore an ill-fitting jacket and had a hard, round hat on his blunt head. "Colonel Thorne believes we outnumber the enemy, Major Pinkerton," McClellan gave the chief of his secret service his honorary rank, "is that your determination?"

"Wish it was, chief!" Pinkerton took a stubby pipe out of his mouth, then went on in his broad Scottish accent and with a tone of utter confidence. "There are many more of them than of us, that I'll wager. We had a laddie ride the creek bank yesterday, what was his name? Custer! That's the fellow. Hordes of them, he says, just hordes! A good lad, young Custer."

"You see, Thorne?" McClellan asked, vindicated.

Thorne pointed west and southward to where a smear of hazy whiteness was smudged across the midday sky. "Sir," he appealed. "You see that white cloud? It's dust, sir, dust, and it marks where Jackson's leading men are hurrying to reinforce Lee, but they're ten miles off yet, sir, and so I beg you, sir, I beg you, just go now! Attack!"

"War is always a simple matter to amateurs," McClellan said, his voice dripping with scorn. "Lee would not be standing against us with twenty thousand men, Colonel, though I've no doubt he'd like us to think he has so few. It's called setting a trap, Colonel Thorne, but I'm too old a dog to fall for that one." McClellan's staff officers laughed at this evident shaft of wit. The General smiled. "You heard Major Pinkerton's evaluation, Colonel," he said, "do you doubt him?"

Thorne
's opinion of Pinkerton was unpronounceable, but he made one more effort to hammer sense into his opponents. "This man who rode the lines yesterday," he demanded of Pinkerton. "Did he cross the river?"

"Now how could he do that?" Pinkerton asked, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. "There are eighty thousand rebels across that river, Colonel, and young Custer's too canny a lad to commit suicide," the Scotsman laughed.

"Eighty thousand," McClellan repeated the figure, then pointed to the cloud of dust, "and that dust tells us that more are coming." He stretched his legs to prop his
boots on the strange, fortress-
like barricade and, for a time, with his head sunk on his chest, he frowned toward the distant plateau that was edged by the rebel gunline. "By tomorrow, gentlemen," he announced after a long silence, "we shall doubtless face a hundred thousand enemies, but we shall do our duty. America expects no more of us."

It does expect more,
Thorne
thought savagely. America expects victory. It expects its sons to be spared slaughter in the coming years, it expects an undivided Union and to have Washington's gutters awash in beer while the victory parade marches past, but all McClellan prayed for was survival, and Thorne, appalled at the man's obduracy, could do nothing more. He had tried, and in the cause for which he pleaded Adam Faulconer had died, but McClellan commanded the army and the battle would be fought in the Young Napoleon's own good time. And so the Yankees waited.