Bernard Cornwell - Battle Flag

Forward into the maelstrom where the woods burned.

Into battle.

"IT'S GOD'S WILL, BANKS! God's will!" The Reverend Elial Starbuck was beside himself with joy. The smell of battle was in his nostrils and inflaming him like an infusion of the Holy Spirit. The preacher was fifty-two years old and had never known an exultation quite like this thrill of victory. He was witnessing God's hand at work and seeing the triumph of righteousness over the Slavocracy. "On, on!" he shouted encouragingly to a fresh battery of Northern artillery that traveled toward the smoke of battle. The Reverend Starbuck had come to Culpeper Court House to preach to the troops, but instead found himself cheering them on to glory.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck's jubilation matched General Banks's excitement. The politician turned general was realizing he had won! He was actually trouncing the wretched and infamous Jackson who had given him such misery earlier in the year. The bells of Boston would ring for this success of a native son, and suddenly the realization of the Governor's most daring ambitions seemed so dazzlingly close. Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, seventeenth President of the United States of America. He said the phrase under his breath, relishing it, but then the glory of that triumph dizzied Banks in his saddle, and to steady himself he turned back to the Reverend Starbuck. "How's that son of yours, Starbuck?" Banks asked, trying to give the impression of a man humble and confident enough to make small talk at the moment of glory.

"James is well, thank you, Governor," the preacher responded. "He's with McClellan's forces in front of Richmond. He suffered a touch of fever a month ago, but writes to say he is fully recovered."

"I meant the young man you named after me," Banks said. "How is he?"

"Nathaniel's well, so far as I know," the Reverend Star-buck said curtly, then was saved from any further queries about his traitor son by the arrival of an aide on a horse that had a mane paled by dust and flanks foaming with sweat. The aide gave Banks a swift salute and a note from Brigadier General Crawford. The note had been hastily scribbled in the saddle, and Banks found it hard to decipher the penciled letters.

"News of victory, I hope?" Banks suggested to the newly arrived aide.

"The General's requesting reinforcements, sir," the aide said respectfully. His horse trembled as a rebel shell wailed overhead.

"Reinforcements?" Banks asked. In the pause after his question the rebel shell exploded harmlessly behind, scattering dirt across the road. "Reinforcements?" Banks said again, frowning as though he found the word incomprehensible. Then he straightened his already immaculate uniform. "Reinforcements?" he asked a third time. "But I thought he was driving the enemy from the field?"

"We need to break them, sir." The aide sounded enthusiastic. "One more brigade will rout them utterly."

"I hoped they were finished already," Banks said, crumpling Crawford's message in his hand.

"They're skulking in some woods, sir. Our fellows are pressing hard, but they'll need help."

"There isn't any help!" Banks said indignantly, as though the aide were spoiling his moment of glory. "I sent him Gordon's brigade; isn't that enough?"

The aide glanced at the gaudily uniformed Pennsylvania Zouaves who formed General Banks's personal bodyguard. "Maybe we should send every man available, sir, to destroy them before they're saved by nightfall?" He spoke very respectfully, as befitted a captain offering tactical advice to a major general.

"We have no reserves, Captain," Banks said in a peevish voice. "We are fully committed! So press on. Press hard. Tell Crawford it's his responsibility now. I won't have men calling for help, not when we're on the verge of victory. Go back and tell him to push on hard, you hear me? Push on hard and no stopping till nightfall." The long speech had restored Banks's confidence. He was winning; it was God's will that the vaunted Stonewall Jackson should be humbled. "It's nervousness, plain nervousness," Banks explained General Crawford's request to the men who surrounded him. "A fellow finds himself on the winning side and can't believe his luck so he asks for help at the last moment!"

"I hope you'll be kind to Crawford in your memoirs, sir," the Zouave commander observed.

"To be sure, to be sure," Banks said, who had not considered his memoirs till this moment, but now found himself dreaming of a three-volume work, provisionally entitled Banks's War. He decided he would depict his early defeats as necessary deceptions that had lured the cabbage-eating Jackson on to destruction at Cedar Mountain. "I might have been reviled"—the General rehearsed a sentence in his head—"but I was playing a longer hand than my critics knew, especially those journalistic curs who dared to offer me advice even though not one of them could tell a Parrott gun from a bird's beak."

The Reverend Elial Starbuck broke this pleasant reverie by begging Banks's permission to ride forward so he could observe the pursuit and final humiliation of the enemy. "Your triumph is an answer to my prayers, Governor," the preacher said, "and I would dearly like to witness its full fruits."

"My dear Starbuck, of course you must ride forward. Captain Hetherington?" Banks summoned one of his junior aides to accompany the preacher, though he also cautioned the aide not to expose the Reverend Starbuck to any danger. The caution was given to make certain that the Reverend Starbuck survived to preach Banks's fame from his influential pulpit. "A wounded cur can still bite," Banks warned the preacher, "so you must stay well clear of the dying beast's jaws."

"God will preserve me, Governor," the Reverend Starbuck averred. "He is my strong shield and protector."

Thus guarded, the Reverend Starbuck set off across the fields with Hetherington, first threading a path between rows of army wagons with white canvas hoods, then passing a field hospital where the Reverend Starbuck paused to inspect the faces of the wounded Southern prisoners who lay after surgery on the grass outside the tents. Some were still comatose from the effects of chloroform, a few slept from sheer weariness, but the majority lay pale and frightened. A few crudely bandaged casualties lay waiting for the surgeons' knives, and to anyone unaccustomed to battle the sight of such grievously hurt men might have proved more than the strongest stomach could abide, but the Reverend Starbuck seemed positively enlivened by the horrid spectacle. Indeed, he leaned out of his saddle for a closer look at one man's mangled limbs and bloodied scalp. "You note the low cranial gap and the pronounced teeth?" he observed to Hetherington.

"Sir?" Hetherington asked in puzzlement.

"Look at his face, man! Look at any of their faces! Can't you see the pronounced difference between them and the Northern visage?"

Captain Hetherington thought that the Southerners did not look very much different from Northerners, except that they were generally thinner and a good deal more raggedly uniformed, but he did not want to contradict the eminent preacher, and so he agreed that the captured rebels did indeed display low foreheads and feral teeth.

"Such features are the classic symptoms of feeblemindedness and moral degradation," the Reverend Starbuck announced happily, then remembered the Christian duty that was owed even to such fallen souls as these rebel prisoners. "Though your sins be as scarlet," he called down to them, "yet you may be washed whiter than snow. You must repent! You must repent!" He had come equipped with copies of his tract, Freeing the Oppressed, which explained why Christian men should be prepared to die for the sacred cause of abolishing slavery, and now the Reverend Starbuck dropped a few copies among the wounded men. "Something to read during your imprisonment," he told them, "something to explain your errors." He spurred on, cheered by this chance to have spread the good word. "We have been remiss, Captain," the preacher declared to Hetherington as the two men left the hospital behind, "in restricting our mission work to heathen lands and Southern slaves. We should have sent more good men into the rebellious states to tussle with the demons that dwell in the white man's soul."