Confederates by Thomas Keneally

answer. Usaph saved up his rancour for the conscript Cate.
    When Bumpass didn’t answer, the others just forgot him and sat there trading their usual stories of hot widows and wartime adulteries. Ashabel Judd told how he had gone out into the Pendleton County Hills looking for the tracks of a stag. ‘Christmas, two year back. And like a dang fool I ventured too far and had to find a house to bide the night. Well, the houses in Pendleton are few and I found this quiet place, no paint, mountain trash, you know the manner of people they might be. Well, that door was opened by a wild red-haired widder. There was just herself and her poor simple sister.…’
    â€˜Oh, you service simple gals, do you, Ash Judd?’ Murphy asked him.
    But Ash was shaking his head, and there was something true about the way all bravado had vanished from his tale. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Not the simple gal. Not her, poor thing.’
    â€˜I,’ said Murphy, ‘once met a girl in a field near Charlottesville.’ He lowered his voice as if it were all a secret, but it wasn’t so secret Usaph couldn’t hear it. ‘I’d gone off looking for chickens and found herself culling early berries – she had, oh my dear Lord, sweet fingers. After I’d rode her bare-assed in edge of the woods, right there in the goddam sedge-grass, she says to me without blushing, d’you know Sergeant So-and-So my dear husband. He’s Captain So-and-so’s right hand in the 3rd Virginia, except it wasn’t the 3rd Virginia, if you take my meaning, it was a regiment closer to home than the 3rd, but I ain’t intending to specify further which one. Right there, off pat, with my fresh spunk in her, she says it.’ Murphy adopted a feminine voice. ‘D’you know my dear husband Sergeant So-and-so …’
    â€˜All right, all right,’ called Usaph, sweating freely, wanting to know , that was all. Wanting to know. Never wanting to know. ‘The story’s taken, for God’s sake, the story’s understood!’
    And that made Ash and Bolly hoot and Murphy look mean.
    Looking away, Usaph saw the fiddler studying the huddle of conscripts. The man began signalling with his eyes and eyebrows to someone, and the thin young conscript, maybe eighteen, that he’d shown an interest in earlier, stood up and walked over to the place the fiddler was playing and sat down near him. The fiddler and the boy stared at each other for some ten seconds until all around them disgusted hisses and grunts started to rise. There might have been some arguments about that kind of behaviour if it hadn’t happened that all over the bivouac other fiddles were starting up, and from the 5th Virginia’s camp site a little distance away a battery of tin whistles swelled the sound, for the 5th Virginia was all Irish.
    It seemed to the tormented Usaph that everyone but him began singing ‘Just Before The Battle, Mother’. But they used the words that made a mock of the song.
    â€˜Just before the battle, mother,
    I was drinking mountain dew.
    When I saw the Yankees marching,
    To the rear I quickly flew,
    O I long to see you, mother,
    And the loving ones at home,
    That’s why I’m skedaddling southwards,
    While there’s still flesh on my bones.…’
    The fiddler could tell that the evening was spoiling on him. Just because the others didn’t like him giving favours to a conscript. So he went on to a real spell-binder. ‘All Quiet Along the Potomac’, written in the North but imported South in smuggled copies of Harper’s . It was – as boys said – ‘one of them songs against officers’.
    â€˜All quiet along the Potomac, they say,
    Except now and then a stray picket
    Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
    By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
    â€™Tis nothing, a private or two now and then
    Will not count in the news of the battle;
    Not an