“Doan waste zee ammunition, men. Vait til you zee the Rebels, zen shoot zem down!”
Wake slowed down his run to a walk and spoke to the quartermaster. “Hilderbrandt, pick five men and send them to Meade. Let me know immediately if the enemy attacks this side.”
“Ya vol, zir!”
The sounds of musketry increased now from McDougall and Faber’s area on the northeastern approaches, as the wind and rain subsided to a slower but constant rate. Sloshing in his soaked uniform, Wake quickly walked toward the trader’s hut only to stop one building away. The Confederates had already taken most of the structures on this side of the crossroads. Several sailors still lay in unnatural poses on the ground.
Wake recognized one of them, lying face down with his right arm and leg strangely out of position from his torso. The flesh was shredded, like meat emerged from a grinder. It was young Beasley, the apprentice seaman from Kent Island on Maryland’s eastern shore who told Wake a month earlier that he had family fighting for the Confederacy in one of their regiments. Beasley’s father had told him the proper thing to do was to be loyal to the Union, even if the rest of the family wasn’t. Beasley didn’t look very proper now, Wake thought, listening to a drum roll from the enemy. After the drum sounded he noticed something had changed.
A lull in the noise around him jarred Wake from the sight of the boy, unnerving him by the relative silence. He glanced around nervously to ascertain why the volume of sound had decreased. Soon it was obvious.
The firing had slacked as the enemy soldiers advanced in twos and threes from cover to cover, no longer pouring shots at the sailors from massed volleys. Artillery fire had stopped altogether since their own infantrymen were now in the target area. The sailors were firing as best they could at the darting shapes coming toward them. Wake could hear McDougall in his gun deck voice admonishing his men.
“Mark your targets before you fire! Mark them and shoot them down, steady like, lads.”
Faber came around the corner of the barn next to Wake and ran over to him. “Sir, we’ve taken some casualties. Down to somewhere’s around nine or ten men. Don’t know how long we can hold. Those are real soldiers out there! They ain’t some militia boys from the neighborhood.”
Wake walked quickly with Faber over to another corner of the building where Foley, the seaman who had run to tell him of Hammersley’s arrival, was lying on the ground calmly shooting at the men in tan who were moving across a field in front of him. Faber crawled up behind Foley to get a look at what was on that side.
“Foley, I’m coming up behind ya, keep on shootin’.”
As he finished the statement Faber and Wake heard a crack, louder than the other noises around them, and they saw Foley’s head snap impossibly backward over his neck, then roll to the right. The front of his face had a huge hole where his nose had been and the back half of his head was gone, showing the interior cavities of his skull. Wake had never seen such a sight and stared until he heard a moan growing into a wail from the man beside him. Bloody brain matter was splattered all over Faber.
“Oh God! Oh Jesus! Captain! Foley’s dead. Look at his brains on me!”
Wake dragged Faber away, pushing him down behind the opposite corner of the barn. Then he returned and grabbed Foley’s musket out of his limp hands. It was still loaded and he knelt on one knee, leaning around the corner to fire at anything he could. He saw a figure in the window of a home across the way and tried to determine if it was a sailor or a soldier. Then he saw a kepi hat, the sign of a soldier, and fired the musket. The soldier wasn’t hit. He didn’t even duck. He just looked around to see where the shot had come from. His steadiness impressed Wake. It was obvious that these were not only regulars, but unshakable veterans of battle.
Another drum beat a tattoo and the shooting decreased. Wake could hear Southern accents yelling.
“Hold your fire, now. Fifteenth, hold your fire now!”
Soon the shooting to the north tapered off. All around the crossroads village the sounds of guns firing had stopped. Only the rain continued, in a slow, steady drip from the low clouds overhead. It was a relief from the cacophony that had heralded the death of so many, just moments earlier.
Faber was still distraught, refusing to look in the direction of Foley and staring at his bloodied uniform. The bosun’s mate sat with his back to the barn wall, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “They’s a stopped shootin’, sir. What’s happenin’, sir?”
“I’m not quite sure, Faber, but I’d better find out. I need your help.”
Faber calmed his breathing and nodded to his captain.
“I want you to tell Hilderbrandt to send three more men from his area to this side of the crossroads.”
Faber acknowledged the order and brought himself up from the ground, running at full speed across the open space where the two roads intersected. Wake dashed over to where McDougall was standing by the wall of a thatch house.
“McDougall, what do you make of the lull?”
“Don’t rightly know, sir. They’d pushed our lads back but then didn’t follow through. They had us, Captain. Had us dead to rights.”
Again a drum sounded, a plaintive long roll that was prolonged by the musician playing it. From behind one of the dwellings on the Collmerton road, Wake heard a man shout something indecipherable, then shout it again. He understood it the second time.
“Yanks! Can y’all heah me? Sendin’ in a parley flag of truce. Doan
