Confederates by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781504026758
Publisher: Open Road Media

25

About dusk that day some hundred or so Confederate cavalrymen edged down to the forest on the rim of the village of Bristoe Station. They could see the railway depot just a hundred yards away across a meadow. There was no one there. No pickets, no railroad workers. Beyond the depot the little white town sat on a bit of a rise. The Railroad Hotel stood behind a picket fence just fifty paces or so from the railroad yard itself.

The captain commanding the cavalry put his left squadron to the task of sealing off the north end of Main Street and his right to sealing off the southern. He knew that some of General Henry Forno’s Frenchies from Louisiana were coming down the Bristoe road to join him, but it went against the cavalry officer’s temperament to wait for them – the noise of their goddam feet would likely give them away in any case.

Over beyond the railroad, in the front parlour of the Railroad Hotel, Captain Pinder of the 8th Connecticut sat drinking whisky with two of his young officers. They were boys from western Connecticut, from the gentle towns round the foothills of the Berkshires. They were waiting for the innkeeper to come and tell them dinner was ready. Just before seven these three gentlemen heard a shot in Main Street and then a fury of rifle fire. Pinder and the two boys had never been in action before and it took them a struggle of the mind to believe that a test of fire had dropped in on them this summer evening, so far up the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, with dinner cooking.

Captain Pinder went into the hallway. He saw the host of the hotel trembling in the doorway of the dining room and then there were dozens of his own men pounding up the hotel front steps, crowding into the narrow passage.

‘Stuart’s boys!’ they were yelling. ‘It’s a goddam Stuart raid!’ and like stuff.

He could tell they thought it was against the rules for cavalry to come down on them at supper-time, and goddam it, Captain Pinder agreed with them. ‘Front rooms!’ he ordered them, and they crowded into the front parlour. Above the firing came the Rebel scream, getting close along the road, and it stung the skin behind their ears and at the backs of their necks.

They crushed up to the open window of the room where Pinder and the two boys had been drinking. The whisky bottle sat on the table there still. They began firing through the window, a dozen boys firing at a time, a dozen loading up and milling behind them. Pinder thought that it was so crowded in here they’d start killing each other just by accident or through panic. ‘You others,’ he yelled into the hallway, ‘upstairs!’

But there was already a lean man on a lean horse clattering up the hotel’s wooden steps onto the porch. There an eighteen-year-old Connecticut boy looked up at him as if he were a horseman from God, rake-lean and impermeable against the setting sun.

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