Bernard Cornwell - Battle Flag

Starbuck's pains seemed almost numb by the time the sun began to sink behind the serrated peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ahead of him he saw the soldiers taking off their hats, and he wondered why so many would make that gesture, and then a staff officer cantered back along the line of march calling out that the men were not to cheer. "We don't want any Yankee cavalry scouts to hear us," the staff officer said, "so no cheering."

Cheering? Why no cheering? Starbuck, his thoughts wrenched back from imagined Washington luxuries to his wretched, sweating reality, suddenly saw a poker-backed figure standing atop a house-sized rock beside the road. It was Jackson, hat in hand, watching his troops march by. Starbuck instinctively straightened his shoulders and tried to put some spirit into his step. He snatched the ragged, sweat-stained hat off his long black hair and stared at the hard-faced man, who, seeing Starbuck, gave the smallest nod of recognition. Behind Starbuck the Legion pulled off their hats and fell into step to march past the legendary General. No one cheered, no one said a word, but for the next mile it seemed to Starbuck that there was an extra spring in every man's pace.

They marched on into the evening. The western sky was a livid crimson streaked with gold, a blaze of color that slowly shrank and faded into a gray twilight. The marching pains came back, relieved now by the slow fall in the day's fierce temperature. The men looked for signs of bivouacs that would tell them they had arrived at their destination, but no troops were camped beside the road and no campflres drifted smoke into the evening; instead the march went on and on into the darkness. The moon rose to whiten the dust that coated the Legion's rifles and clung to the men's skin. No one sang, no one spoke, they just marched on and on, mile after damned mile under a gibbous moon. To their right, far off, a great red glow showed where the smear of Yankee cooking fires covered the northern Virginia counties, and Starbuck, trying to keep himself alert, realized that Jackson's army was already north of most of that glow, which surely meant that the enemy was outflanked, and for the first time he wondered if they were indeed planning to turn west into the Shenandoah. Maybe, he thought, they would turn east instead, to plunge like a dagger into the Yankee rear.

"In here! In here! No fires!" A voice startled Starbuck out of his reverie, and he saw a horseman gesturing toward a night-dark meadow. "Get some rest." The horseman was evidently a staff officer. "We'll be marching at dawn. No fires! There's a stream at the bottom of the hill for water. No fires!"

Starbuck acknowledged the orders, then stood in the meadow's gate to watch the Legion shamble past. "Well done!" he called out to each company. "Well done." The men scarcely acknowledged his presence, but just limped into the meadow that lay at the crest of a small hill. Moxey kept on the far side of his company so he would not even have to acknowledge Starbuck's existence.

Truslow's company went past last. "Any stragglers?" Starbuck asked.

"None that you need know of."

Starbuck walked beside Truslow into the meadow. "A hell of a march," he said tiredly.

"And tomorrow we probably do it again," Truslow said. "You want me to set a guard?"

Starbuck was tempted to accept the offer, but he knew the men of Company H would think he had picked on them because they were his old company, and so he deliberately chose Company A instead. Major Medlicott was too tired to

complain.

Starbuck limped round his men's bivouac. He wanted to make certain that they had water to drink, but most had already fallen asleep. They had simply lain down on the grass and closed their eyes, so that now they lay like the dead collected for burial at battle's end. A few walked to the stream to fill their canteens, a few smoked, a few gnawed at hardtack, but most of the men just lay sprawled in the moonlight.

Starbuck stayed awake with the pickets. To the south the moon shone on yet more men tramping up the road, but one by one the regiments turned into the fields to snatch their brief rest. The regiments were still coming when Starbuck woke Medlicott to relieve him, and still marching when he lay down to sleep. He dreamed of marching, of pain, of a sun-bitten day spent sweating northward on a stone-hard road that led, not to whores on white sheets in a fattened city, but to battle.

On the morning that Jackson's army marched west Major Galloway received orders to report to General McDowell, whose troops formed the right wing of Pope's army. An odd and disquieting report had come from that western flank. One of General Banks's staff officers had been spying the enemy positions from a hill north of the Rappahannock and had spotted a distant column of mixed infantry and artillery marching westward on the river's far bank. The road the rebels were following snaked up and down through hilly country, so that the staff officer could only glimpse scattered parts of the column, but he had estimated the number of regiments by counting their flags and reported that the rebel force must have numbered at least twenty thousand men. The column had eventually disappeared in the heat haze that shimmered over the distant farmland and woods.

General Banks forwarded the report to General McDowell, who in turn sent it on to General Pope with an added comment that the column was probably aiming to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and then advance north through the Shenandoah Valley. Maybe, McDowell surmised, the rebel force planned to attack the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, then cross the river and threaten Washington?

Pope added the report to all the other disquieting evidence of rebel activity. Jeb Stuart's horsemen had raided one of the army's forward supply depots at Catlett's Station. The rebel horse had swarmed out of a rainswept night like fiends from hell, and though the raid had done little real damage, it had made everyone nervous. There were more reports of rebel activity on Pope's eastward flank near Fredericksburg, while other observers saw clear signs that the rebels were planning a direct assault across the Rappahannock River. General Pope felt like a juggler given one Indian club too many, and so he sent a stream of peremptory telegrams to the War Department in Washington demanding to know when he might expect McClellan's forces to join his own, then rattled off a series of orders designed to repel all the threatened attacks at once. Union troops marched and countermarched under the hot sun, none of them knowing quite what they were doing or where the enemy was supposed to be.

It was the cavalry's job to determine the enemy's position, and so Major Galloway was ordered to report to General McDowell, who in turn instructed him to lead his men into the swathe of empty country that lay between the Northern army and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was into that hazy spread of land that the mysterious enemy column had been seen marching, and McDowell wanted Galloway to find it, but just as Galloway was ready to leave, a new order arrived from General Pope's headquarters. It seemed a party of rebel horsemen had recently crossed Kelly's Ford, and Galloway was ordered to find out where that enemy was headed.

The Major demanded a map. It took him a long time to discover Kelly's Ford. He had somehow expected it to be near Warrenton, where McDowell's forces were anchored, but instead he found it to be fifteen miles away on the army's eastern flank. He protested the stupidity of one cavalry regiment being required to be in two places at once, but was told that most of the army's cavalry was either immobilized through lack of fodder or else was busy. Galloway stared down at the map. "Which job's the most important?" he asked.

Pope's staff officer, a Colonel, scratched in his beard. "I reckon that if the Johnnies are crossing Kelly's Ford, then they'll be planning to cut us off from McClellan's boys." He ran a nicotine-stained finger up from the ford to show how a rebel force could cut Pope's men off from Aquia Creek, where McClellan's army was coming ashore. "They'd split us up. And that'd be bad. Real bad."