Confederates Read Online Free Page B

one set of pickets would set the other side going. He thought how ridiculous it would be if Stonewall Jackson was lost to the Confederacy because a few Alabamans shot at an eccentric Yankee aeronaut.
    But when they were halfway across the field, returning towards their own picket lines, the General was distracted by the plumpness of the blackberries on shoulder-high bushes all round. He was a true country boy. Fruit always attracted him and often he would just sit on a fence sucking a lemon.
    He began to pluck the berries and so did Sandie. Boteler waited, shaking his head a little. If he had to ride back to Richmond this afternoon, the last thing he wanted was a bellyful of berries.
    General Jackson ate the fruit heartily, but Ewell, with his weak stomach, picked just a few and ate them slowly. He suffered from ulcers and, as did two-thirds of his command, from camp diarrhoea. To the left the Alabamans were firing at Professor Lowe’s colourful balloon, which was drifting north-west, and to distract them a picket line of Yankees advanced towards the meadow fence and began firing lazy volleys up open corridors amongst the blackberries. Mr Boteler crouched and Ewell gave up the blackberry-culling and mapped out their best path. He saw that up to the right the woods reached a spot almost level with the place where he and Jackson, the aide and Mr Boteler stood. In that wing of woods General Robert Toombs’s Georgians should be. If the firing didn’t get too intense, that was the way to go, into the elbow where the Alabaman and Georgian picket lines met.
    With a mash of berries in his mouth, Stonewall let a sly grin creep over his lean jaws. It broadened when a minie ball slapped a leaf some three feet from his ear.
    â€˜Some nervous boy from goddam Massachusetts,’ Ewell swore. But he was worried for the General and also for himself.
    â€˜Tell me, Sandie,’ said the General, holding a fat berry between forefinger and thumb, ‘if you knew you were going to be shot and had a choice …’
    It was an eternal question of discussion. Generals and privates thought about it. With some the consideration became morbid. Others suspected that if they talked about the wound they wanted least, it would stay away from them through some sort of sympathetic magic.
    Sandie thought and said: ‘I just don’t want one of those silly wounds, General. You know, the kind that shouldn’t kill a man, but you bleed to death.’
    This wasn’t quite the truth. Such deaths made him angry, but the deaths he really feared were wounds from artillery, and especially to be dismembered.
    â€˜If I’m shot,’ Ewell muttered, ‘I want it to be where I’ve been wounded already – in the clothing. Otherwise I don’t want it to be in the face or joints, not with Monsieur Minié’s famous expanding bullet. But I think the face would be the worst.’ He wondered if some Union boy wasn’t at that moment sighting on his head.
    â€˜I suppose,’ Sandie said, picking two particularly nice blackberries and handing them to the General, ‘you’re at a distance from the damage if you get it in other parts of the body. You can inspect a wound there. But you can’t inspect a wound in the face.’
    â€˜Nor one in the back,’ said Tom Jackson, gorging the berries. He was like that – even at full-scale dinners he often ate just the one thing in big amounts. Sometimes it was strawberries, sometimes it was bread. Hostesses hated him for it.
    Flap, flap! went two bullets, ripping leaves from a bush a few paces off.
    â€˜The wound I’d hate,’ said Boteler, grinning but not at ease, ‘would be to lose my constituency. ‘He knew there was no electoral chance of that. For he was the General’s Congressman and neither of them ever lost.
    Anyhow, they laughed and the General asked them if they’d had enough blackberries, as if picking fruit had