The fighting began at six, and by nine the sides had thrown each other back and forth across the cornfield several times. The waving cross of St. Andrew, the Souths battle ensign, had gone down in the noise and smoke and been raised several times. The battle was so huge and swiftly shifting that Charles saw only threads, never the pattern.
Coming back from Nicodemus Hill, head down, revolver in hand, he was caught in a driving charge of federals against Old Jack's men, who lay waiting amid trees on rocky ridges. A colonel who had lost several officers ordered Charles off Sport at gunpoint and screamed, "Hold this position at all hazards."
So he fought in the woods with two squads of the foot cavalry for fifteen incredible minutes, shooting at Yankees who came running over the, pike, bayonets gleaming steadily brighter as the sun burned off the mist and hot, cheerful light broke over the battle. In the midst of Old Jack's men, Charles fired, reloaded, shouted, encouraged — helped repulse the charge that cost the Yankees almost five thousand men in under half an hour. When the jubilant foot cavalry went hollering and countercharging toward the cornfield, Charles, feeling that his duty to the anonymous colonel had been discharged, ran back, untied Sport, and went on his way, shaking from nerves and excitement.
As he rode out from the rocks behind the Dunker Church, a bloodied figure in blue rose up and rammed a bayonet at Sport. Charles shot the soldier — in the face, as it happened; he had been aiming lower. He saw beardless flesh and red tissue and an eye fly away as the boy went down. The sight did something to Charles's sensibilities, set some unwholesome process in motion.
Shells burst; the ground trembled. He shook himself like a wet dog and pressed on, fearing Sport wouldn't survive the morning.
Along about eleven, the cockpit of the battle had shifted to a sunken road east and slightly south of the cornfield, which Charles passed through about this time. In the last three hours at least a dozen charges had gone screaming and lurching and shooting back and forth where the stalks could no longer be seen. Head high yesterday, they were gone, beaten and stamped and crushed down by living men, and dead.
He sensed he was staring into some demonic kaleidoscope, each gory scene a new variation in horror. Seeing them, Charles felt his self-control slipping. He gripped the rein more and more tightly. While turtle's instinct brought his head down beneath another billowy burst in the sky, he thought of a face. A name. Anchored himself to both.
He had an impulse to dismount and hide. It passed, and he kept going in the direction of the sunken road, where Old Bob's officers and men were not just scrapping to save the army now but maybe the whole Confederacy, too.
Charles forced Sport ahead. He was a man adrift on a vast, destructive sea. No cause could save his life; no slogan. Just scraps of memory.
Name.
Face —
Her.
Near the sunken road, he was among madmen — soldiers in gray seeing the elephant for the first time and berserk with fear. He watched one throw his canteen away; another pound one, two, three, four balls down his rifle muzzle without counting, without noticing; a third standing with clenched fists, squalling like an abandoned child. A sky-borne chunk of exploded iron cut off his left leg and his yell in one neat slice. Blood pattered the ground like the earlier drizzle.
"Get up, get up, damn you!"
Charles saw the shouter, a red-faced, red-bearded lieutenant booting a fallen horse. The lieutenant's men crouched around a three-inch Blakely gun foundered in a rut. The lieutenant kept kicking the horse. Charles bent low as another shell burst, then slid from the saddle, found a rock, put it on the loose end of the rein. He ran forward at a crouch and pushed the hysterical officer with both hands.
"Get away. That horse can't pull anything. That leg's broken."
"But — but — this gun's needed up by the road. I was ordered to move it to the road." The lieutenant wept now.
"Stand aside. You men" — Charles pointed — "cut the traces. We'll pick it up by the trail handle and pull it. Some of you push each wheel. One of you watch my horse."
Through Minie balls thick as bee swarms, shell bursts scattering shrapnel, they hauled the little rifled field gun, cursing like dock hands, sweating ferociously, pulling it forward yard by yard till they found a major, who flourished his saber to salute them. "Good for you, boys! Wheel her right up there."
"The captain done it," said one of the horse artillerymen pushing a wheel. "Our lieutenant couldn't. He's scairt out of his pants."
"Who are you, Captain?" the major asked.
"Charles Main, sir. Scout for Hampton's Brigade."
"I'll write up a commendation for this if any of us survive the day."
Charles turned and ran doubled over back through the field to the soldier guarding Sport. The bearded lieutenant sat on the ground beside the lamed horse. Charles put a bullet into the animal to end its suffering. The lieutenant stared at him with wet eyes, as if he wished for the same mercy.
"Come on, Sport," Charles whispered in a raw voice. He must get back to headquarters.
Going was hard. The federal artillery cannonaded from behind a smoke wall on the heights above the creek. Charles never saw the man who shot him. Something struck his chest, and he jerked sideways, nearly falling from the saddle.
Bewildered, he looked down and found a round hole to the left of a shirt button. He opened his shirt and lifted the leather bag. It too had a hole, though not on the reverse side. A ball, maybe partly spent when it struck him but deadly anyway, had been stopped by the book.
He got snarled in Anderson's Brigade, which was being rushed to the sunken road in an attempt to save the position. They made slow progress, and so did he against their flow. What began to effect some permanent change in him wasn't death, which he had seen before, but the staggering multiplication of it. Bodies propped one another up. One, the spattered jacket gray, had no head; green flies crawled on the meaty stump. Bodies hung belly down over farm fences. Bodies of enemies lay twined in accidental embrace.
An artillery piece and its limber were being raced along the Hagerstown Pike for some unknown purpose, and Charles was near it on the lower perimeter of the cornfield, where bodies in blue and gray and butternut had fallen so closely there was hardly any ground visible. Sport had to slip and pick through a terrain of dead backs, lifeless heads cocked at strange angles, groping hands wet with the flow from mortal wounds, mouths that howled for succor, water, God to stop the pain.
He tried to cross the pike in front of the racing artillerymen, wasn't fast enough, reined to the side. He heard the shell coming in, saw the horses hit and blown apart.
Smoke shrouded him. Sport reared, whinnying for the first time all morning. Horse bone, horse flesh, horse entrails, horse blood rained down on Charles in a quarter-minute of baptism. He yelled in rage, saw a wounded Yankee, unarmed, rise to his feet a yard away, started to shoot him, and instead leaned to the right and threw up.
Next thing he remembered, he was again riding toward the northern edge of Sharpsburg. Suddenly, in the reddened grass to the right, he spied a fallen man whose form seemed familiar. The man was prone, and by some happenstance his face had landed or been forced into the inverted crown of his wide-brimmed hat.
Shaky, Charles climbed down. "Doan?"
The scout didn't stir. There were bodies strewn along both sides of the road, but Doan's horse was nowhere visible. "Doan?" This time he said it softly, as if in recognition of what he knew he would find when he rolled the scout over.