Battle Flag

"There are plenty of churches, are there not, in the secessionist states?" Captain Hetherington inquired respectfully after leading the preacher around a tangle of telegraph wire that had been dumped beside a ditch.

"There are indeed churches in the South," the Reverend Starbuck said in a tone of distaste, "and pastors, too, I dare say, yet their existence should not deceive us. The scriptures warn us against those false prophets who shall inhabit the latter days. And such prophets have no difficulty in persuading the feebleminded to adopt the devil's ways. But the Second Epistle of Peter promises us that the false prophets shall bring upon themselves a swift destruction. I think we are witnessing the begi

Captain Hetherington wanted to drive the two dogs away from their offal, but the Reverend Starbuck was spurring ahead, and the aide's duty was to stay with the preacher, so he galloped to catch up. "Are you saying, sir," Hetherington asked respectfully, "that none of the rebels are Christians?"

"How can they be?" the Boston preacher responded. "Our faith has never preached rebellion against the lawful and godly authority of the state, so at best the South is in grievous error and thus in desperate need of repentance and forgiveness. And at worst?" The Reverend Starbuck shook his head rather than even consider such a question, yet the very asking of it made him think of his second son and how Nate was even now irretrievably committed to the fires of hell. Nate would burn in everlasting flames, tormented through all eternity by agonies unimaginable. "And he deserves it!" the Reverend Starbuck protested aloud.

"I'm sorry, sir?" Hetherington asked, thinking he had misheard a comment addressed to him.

"Nothing, Captain, nothing. You are saved yourself?"

"Indeed, sir. I came to Christ three years ago, and have praised God for His mercies ever since."

"Praise Him indeed," the Reverend Starbuck responded, though in truth he was secretly disappointed that his escort should thus prove to be a born-again Christian, for there were few things Elial Starbuck enjoyed so much as having what he called a tussle with a si

The two men arrived at a Northern battery of twelve-pounder Napoleons. The four guns were silent, their shirt-sleeved gu

"The peasantry?" the Reverend Starbuck inquired.

"The infantry, sir. Lowest of the low, see what I mean, sir?"

The Reverend Starbuck did not see at all, but decided not to make an issue of his puzzlement. "And the rebels?" he asked instead. "Where are they?"

The gu

"It is the Lord's doing, the Lord's doing!" the Reverend Starbuck murmured happily.

"The seceshers are still lively over there." Captain Hetherington gestured to far-off Cedar Mountain, where gunsmoke still jetted from the rebel batteries.

"But not for long." The artillery Major spoke confidently. "We'll hook behind their rear and take every man jack of them prisoner. As long as nightfall doesn't come first," he added. The sun was very low and the light reddening.

The Reverend Starbuck took a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the woods ahead. He could see very little except for smoke, leaves, and burning shell craters, though in the nearer open land he could make out the humped shapes of the dead lying in the remnants of the wheat field. "We shall go to the woods," he a

"I'm not sure we should, sir," Captain Hetherington demurred politely. "There are still shells falling."

"We shall come to no harm, Captain. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we shall fear no evil. Come!" In truth the Reverend Starbuck wanted to ride closer to those bursting shells. He had decided that his exhilaration was symptomatic of a natural taste for battle, that maybe he was discovering a God-given talent for warfare, and it was suddenly no wonder to him that the Lord of Hosts had so frequently exhorted Israel to the fight. This blood and slaughter was the way to see God's work accomplished! Sermonizing and mission work were all very well, and doubtless God listened to the prayers of all those wilting women with faded silk bookmarks in their well-thumbed Bibles, but this hammer of battle was a more certain method of bringing about His kingdom. The si

Hetherington paused, but the artillery Major was in full agreement with the preacher. "They're well beaten, sir, and amen," the Major declared, and that encouragement was enough to make the Reverend Starbuck hand down some copies of Freeing the Oppressed for the weary gu

Captain Hetherington followed unhappily. "We don't know that the rebels are yet cleared from the woods, sir."

"Then we shall find out, Captain!" the Reverend Starbuck said happily. He trotted past the remains of a Northerner who had been blown apart by the direct hit of a rebel shell, and who was now nothing but a fly-crawling mess of jagged-ended bones, blue guts, torn flesh, and uniform scraps. The Reverend felt no anguish at the sight, merely the satisfaction that the dead man was a hero who had gone to his Maker by virtue of having died for a cause as noble as any that had ever driven man onto the battlefield. A few paces beyond the dead Federal was the corpse of a Southerner, his throat cut to the bone by a fragment of shell casing. The wretch was dressed in gaping shoes, torn pants, and a threadbare coat of pale gray patched with brown, but the corpse's most repellent aspect was the grasping look on his face. The preacher reckoned he saw that same depraved physiognomy on most of the rebel dead and on the faces of the rebel wounded who cried for help as the two horsemen rode by. These rebels, the Reverend Starbuck decided, were demonstrably feebleminded and doubtless morally infantile. The doctors in Boston were convinced that such mental weaknesses were inherited traits, and the more the Reverend Elial Starbuck saw of these Southerners, the more persuaded he was of that medical truth. Had there been miscegenation? Had the white race so disgraced itself with its own slaves that it was now paying the hereditary price? That thought so disgusted the Reverend that he flinched, but then an even more terrible thought occurred to him. Was his son Nathaniel's moral degradation inherited? The Reverend Starbuck cast that suspicion out. Nathaniel was a backslider and so doubly guilty. Nathaniel's sins could not be laid at his parents' door, but only at his own wicked feet.