The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 Read Online Free PDF Page A

amusement.
    Starbuck swore and raised his eyes to the clouded heavens. The Yellowlegs had gained their nickname and lost their reputation during the week of springtime battles in which Lee had finally turned McClellan's Northern army away from Richmond. Jackson's men had come from the Shenandoah Valley to help Lee and among them were the 66th Virginia, a newly raised regiment that saw its first and, so far, last action near Malvern Hill. They had run away, not from a hard fight, but from the very first shells that fell near them. Their nickname, the Yellowlegs, supposedly described the state of their pants after they pissed themselves in fright. "Pissed in unison," Truslow had told Starbuck on hearing the story, "and made a whole new swamp." Later it was determined that the regiment had been too hastily raised, too skimpily trained, and too badly officered, and so its rifles had been given to men willing to fight and its men taken away to be retrained. "So who's this Colonel Holborrow?" Swynyard asked Maitland.
    "He's in charge of training the punishment battalions," Maitland answered airily. "Wasn't there one at the battle last week?"
    "Hell, yes," Starbuck answered. "And it was no damn good." The punishment battalion at the previous week's battle had been a makeshift collection of defaulters, stragglers, and shirkers, and it had collapsed within minutes. "Hell!" Starbuck said. Now, it seemed, the 66th Virginia had been renamed as a punishment battalion, which suggested its morale was no higher than when it had first earned its nickname and, if the performance of the 1st Punishment Battalion was anything to go by, no better trained either.
    Lucifer put two mugs of coffee on the makeshift table and then, after a glance at Starbuck's distraught face, backed far enough away so that the three officers would think he was out of earshot.
    "This is madness!" Swynyard had found a new energy to protest. "Who sent the order?"
    "The War Department," Maitland answered, "of course."
    "Who in the War Department?" Swynyard insisted.
    "You can read the signature, can't you, Colonel?"
    The name on the ord er meant nothing to either Star buck or to Swynyard, but Griffin Swynyard had a shrewd idea where the papers might have come from. "Is General Faulconer posted to the War Department?" he asked Maitland.
    Maitland took the cigar from his mouth, spat a speck of leaf from his lips, then shrugged as if the question were irrelevant. "General Faulconer's been made Deputy Secretary of War, yes," he answered. "Can't let a good man idle away just because Tom Jackson took a dislike to him."
    "And General Faulconer made you the Legion's commanding officer," Swynyard said.
    "I guess the General put in a good word for me," Maitland said. "The Legion's a Virginia regiment, Colonel, and the General reckoned it ought to be led by a Virginian. So here I am." He smiled at Swynyard.
    "Son of a bitch," Starbuck said. "Faulconer. I should have known." General Washington Faulconer had been the Legion's founder and the brigade's commander until Jackson had dismissed him for incompetence. Faulconer had fled the army convinced that Starbuck and Swynyard had been responsible for his disgrace, but instead of retreating to his country house and nursing his hurt, he had gone to Richmond and used his connection and wealth to gain a government appointment. Now, safe in the Confederate capital, Faulconer was reaching out to take his revenge on the two men he saw as his bitterest enemies. To Swynyard he had bequeathed a man of equal rank who would doubtless be an irritant, but Faulconer was trying to destroy Starbuck altogether.
    "He'd have doubtless liked to get rid of me too," Swynyard said. He had led Starbuck away from the tent and was walking him up and down out of Maitland's hearing. "But Faulconer knows who my cousin is." Swynyard's cousin was the editor of Richmond's Examiner, the most powerful of the five daily papers published in the Confederate capital, and that