Battle Flag. Bernard Cornwell

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      SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN dawned hot and humid. Leaden clouds covered the sky and added to the air’s oppression, which was made even fouler by a miasmic smell that clung to the folds of the battlefield like the morning mist. At first light, when the troops were stirring reluctantly from their makeshift beds, Major Hinton sought out Starbuck. “I’m sorry about last night, Nate,” Hinton said.

      Starbuck offered the Legion’s new commanding officer a curt and dismissive judgment of Washington Faulconer’s raid to snatch the captured flag. The Bostonian was stripped to the waist and had his chin and cheeks lathered with shaving soap plundered from a captured artillery limber. Starbuck stropped his razor on his belt, leaned close to his scrap of mirror, then stroked the long blade down his cheek.

      “So what will you do?” Hinton asked, plainly nervous that Starbuck would be provoked into some rash act.

      “The bastard can keep the rag,” Starbuck said. He had not really known what to do with the captured standard; he had thought that perhaps he might give it to Thaddeus Bird or else send it to Sally Truslow in Richmond. “What I really wanted was the Stars and Stripes,” he confessed to Hinton, “and that eagle flag was only ever second-best, so I reckon that son of a bitch Faulconer can keep it.”

      “It was a stupid thing for Moxey to do, all the same,” Hinton said, unable to conceal his relief that Starbuck did not intend to inflate the night’s stupidity into an excuse for revenge. He watched as Starbuck squinted into a broken fragment of shaving mirror. “Why don’t you grow a beard?” he asked.

      “Because everyone else does,” Starbuck said, although in truth it was because a girl had once told him he looked better clean-shaven. He scraped at his upper lip. “I’m going to murder goddamn Medlicott.”

      “No, you’re not.”

      “Slowly. So it hurts.”

      Major Hinton sighed. “He panicked, Nate. It can happen to anyone. Next time it might be me.”

      “Son of a bitch damn nearly had me killed by panicking.”

      Major Hinton picked up the plundered jar of Roussel’s Shaving Cream, fidgeted with its lid, then watched Starbuck clean the razor blade. “For my sake,” he finally pleaded, “will you just forget about it? The boys are unhappy enough because of Pecker and they don’t need their captains fighting among themselves. Please, Nate? For me?”

      Starbuck mopped his face clean on a strip of sacking. “Give me a cigar, Paul, and I’ll forget that bald-headed lily-livered gutless shad-belly bastard even exists.”

      Hinton surrendered the cigar. “Pecker’s doing well,” he said, his tone brightening as he changed the subject, “or as well as can be expected. Doc Billy even reckons he might survive a wagon ride to the rail depot.” Hinton was deeply worried about replacing the popular Colonel even though he was a popular enough officer himself. He was an easygoing, heavyset man who had been a farmer by trade, a churchman by conviction, and a soldier by accident of history. Hinton had hoped to live out his years in the easy, rich countryside of Faulconer County, enjoying his family, his acres, and his fox-hunting, but the war had threatened Virginia, and so Paul Hinton had shouldered his weapons out of patriotic duty. Yet he did not much enjoy soldiering and reckoned his main duty was to bring safely home as many of the Faulconer Legion as he possibly could, and the men in the Legion recognized that ambition and liked Hinton for it. “We’re to stay where we are today,” Hinton now told Starbuck. “I’ve got to detach a company to collect small arms off the battlefield and another to bring in the wounded. And talking of the wounded,” he added after a second’s hesitation, “did you see Swynyard yesterday? He’s missing.”

      Starbuck also hesitated, then told the truth. “Truslow and I saw him last night.” He gestured with the cigar toward the woods where his company had fought against the Pennsylvanians. “He was lying just this side of the trees. Truslow and I didn’t reckon there was anything to be done for him, so we just left him.”

      Hinton was shrewd enough to guess that Starbuck had abandoned Swynyard to die. “I’ll send someone to look for him,” he said. “He ought to be given a burial.”

      “Why?” Starbuck demanded belligerently.

      “To cheer the Brigade up, of course,” Hinton said, then blushed for having uttered such a thing. He turned to look at the great smear of smoke that rose from the Northern cooking fires beyond the woods. “Keep a good eye on the Yankees, Nate. They ain’t beaten yet.”

      But the Yankees made little hostile movement that morning. Their pickets probed forward but stopped obediently when the rebel outposts opened fire, and so the two armies settled into an uneasy proximity. Then it began to rain, СКАЧАТЬ