Bernard Cornwell - Battle Flag

A staff officer spurred back down the marching column. "Go get your rations, boys! It's all yours. A present from Uncle Abe. All yours!"

The men, invigorated by the thought of plunder, quickened their pace. "Slow down!" Starbuck shouted as the leading companies began to break away from the rest. "Major Medlicott!"

The commander of A Company turned in his saddle and offered Starbuck a lugubrious expression.

"We'll take the end warehouse!" Starbuck pointed to the easternmost part of the depot, which was still clear of rebel troops. He feared the chaos that would result if his regiment was scattered among a score of warehouses and mixed with revelers from a dozen other brigades. "Captain Truslow!" he shouted toward the rear of the column. "I'm relying on you to find ammunition! Lieutenant Howes! I want pickets around the warehouse! Keep our men inside! Coffman? I want you to find some local people and discover where the Galloway farm is."

Yet for the moment there was no time to consider revenge on Galloway's Horse, only to plunge into the stacks of boxes and barrels and crates that were piled in the vast, dim warehouse and inside the adjacent boxcars and wagons. It was a hoard that the hard-pressed Confederate army could only dream of possessing. There were uniforms, rifles, ammunition, haversacks, belts, blankets, tents, saddles, boots, bridles, percussion caps, gum rubber groundsheets, picket pins, telegraph wire, signal flags, and lucifer matches. There were candles, lanterns, camp furniture, drums, sheet music, Bibles, buckets, oilcloth capes, jars of quinine, bottles of camphor, folding flagpoles, bugles, replacement pay books, friction fuses, and artillery shells. There were spades, axes, augurs, saws, bayonets, cooking pots, sabers, swords, and canteens.

Then there was food. Not just army-issue hardtack in boxes and desiccated soup in canvas bags, but luxuries from the wagons of the Northern army's sutlers, who made their money by selling delicacies to the troops. There were barrels of dried oysters and casks of pickles, cakes of white sugar, boxes of loose tea, slabs of salt beef, sacks of rice, cans of fruit, sides of bacon, jars of peaches, combs of honey, bottles of catsup, and flasks of powdered lemon. Best of all there was coffee, real coffee; ready-sweetened coffee, baked, ground, mixed with sugar and packed into sacks. There were also bottles of liquor: rum and brandy, champagne and wine, cases and cases of wine and spirits packed in sawdust and all disappearing fast into thirsty men's haversacks. A few conscientious officers fired revolvers into the cases of liquor in an effort to keep their men from drunkenness, but there were simply too many bottles for the precaution to be of any effect.

"Lobster salad, sir!" Private Hunt, his dirty face smeared from ear to ear with a pink confection, offered Starbuck a knife blade loaded with the delicacy from a newly opened can. "Came from a sutler's wagon."

"You'll make yourself sick, Hunt," Starbuck said.

"I hope so, sir," Hunt said. Starbuck tried the proffered salad and found it delicious.

Starbuck wandered in a daze from one store bay to the next. The supplies seemed to have been stacked without any system, but just crammed into the warehouse in whatever order they had arrived from the North. There were cartridges from Britain, tinned food from France, and salt cod from Portugal. There was lamp oil from Nantucket, cheese from Vermont, and dried apples from New York. There was kerosene, medical sulfur, calcined magnesia, sugar of lead, and laxatives made of powdered rhubarb. There was so much material that if two armies the size of Jackson's force had plundered the depot for a month, they could not have opened every box or explored every dusty stack of crates.

"What you can't carry away, we'll have to burn," a staff officer called to Starbuck, "so search it well!" and the Legion, like small boys released to a toyshop, splintered open the crates and whooped with glee at every fresh discovery. Patrick Hogan of C Company was distributing officers' shoulder boards, while Cyrus Matthews was cramming his face with a nauseating mix of dried apple and chipped beef. One man had discovered a cabin trunk that seemed to contain nothing but chess sets, and he was now disgustedly scattering knights, rooks, and bishops as he dug down in search of greater treasures. Bandmaster Little had found a box of sheet music, while Robert Decker, one of the best men in Truslow's company, had discovered a cased match rifle, precision-made for a marksman and equipped with a barrel-length telescopic sight, a hair trigger, a separate cocking trigger, and a small pair of legs at the barrel's muzzle to support the weapon's huge weight. "It'll kill a mule at five hundred paces, sir!" Decker boasted to Starbuck.

"It'll be heavy to carry, Bob," Starbuck warned him.

"But it'll even things against the sharpshooters, sir," Decker answered. Every rebel hated the Yankee sharpshooters, who were lethally equipped with similar long-range target rifles.

Captain Truslow had commandeered two brand-new seven-ton wagons that both carried small brass plates proclaiming them to be the products of Levergood's Carriage Factory of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were boxes attached to the wagon sides that were filled with repair tools, lanterns, and cans of axle grease, and Truslow, always reluctant to concede that anything could be well made in the hated North, nevertheless admitted that the Levergood's Company built a half-decent vehicle. The two gray-painted wagons would replace the old ammunition carts burned in Galloway's raid, and Truslow had his men busy stacking the wagon beds with boxes of rifle ammunition and crates of percussion caps. The draught horses were fitted with brand-new collars, hames, and traces, then backed into the shafts.

Captain Pine's men were distributing boots, while Lieutenant Patterson's company was handing out sacks of coffee. Captain Davies's company was employed in taking down the barn doors from a warehouse; the doors were needed as ramps so that a Georgian artillery battery could maneuver some brand-new Northern cannons off their gondola cars. The Georgians were presently equipped with Napoleon twelve-pounders that were, in their commander's word, "tired," but now they would be armed with a half-dozen Parrott twenty-pound rifles so new that the packing grease from the foundry was still sticky on their barrels. The artillerymen wrecked the wheels and spiked the vents of their old guns, then dragged away their new weapons, each of which displayed a neatly stenciled legend on its trail: PROPERTY OF THE USA.

Colonel Swynyard watched the plunder from horseback. He had helped himself to a brand-new saddle and was sucking on a strip of beef jerky. "Sixteen men," he said gnomically to Starbuck. "Sir?"

"That's all we lost to straggling. Out of the whole Brigade! And most of them will turn up, I don't doubt. Some other brigades lost hundreds." Swynyard grimaced as the strip of beef aggravated a sore tooth. "I don't suppose you came across any false teeth, did you?" "No, sir, but I'll keep a lookout."

"I think I'll have Doc Billy take all mine out. They're nothing but trouble. I confess, Starbuck, that my new faith in Almighty God is shaken by the existence of teeth. Do your teeth hurt?" "One does."

"You probably smoke too much," Swynyard said. "Tobacco smoke might be good for keeping the lungs open, but I've long believed that the juice of the weed rots the teeth." He frowned, not for the thought of tobacco juice, but because a train whistle had sounded in the warm morning wind. Swynyard gazed toward the northern horizon, where a billow of smoke showed above distant trees. "We've got company, I guess," Swynyard said.

The thought of Northerners reminded Starbuck that Stonewall Jackson would not have marched fifty miles in two days just to replenish his army's stock of ammunition and food. "Does anyone know what's happening?" Starbuck asked the perennial soldier's question.