Battle Flag

***

THEY MARCHED. They marched like they had never marched in their lives before and like they hoped they would never have to march again.

They marched like no troops had ever marched, and they did it through a day as hot as hell and as dry as hell's bones, and through a thick dust kicked up by the men and horses who marched in front; a dust that coated their tongues and thickened their throats and stung their eyes.

They marched on broken boots or with no boots at all. They marched because Old Mad jack had told them he expected them to march, but no one knew why they were marching or where. First they marched west into a plump country unvisited by forage parties from either army, where the folk greeted the leading regiments with crackers, cheese, and milk, but there was not enough food to serve all the men who trudged past: regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade, the long hurting line of Jackson's foot cavalry heading west into America with dust on their faces and blood in their boots and sweat in their beards. "Where are you going, boys?" an old man shouted at the troops.

"Going to lick the Yankees, Pa!" one man found the energy to call back, but no one except the General really knew their destination.

"Lick 'em good, boys! Lick the sumbitches good and hard!"

The Legion had been woken at three in the morning by bugles that had stirred weary men from a shallow sleep. The soldiers grumbled and cursed at Old Jack, then blew their fires alive to boil their foul-tasting coffee.

Starbuck issued all the ammunition the Legion possessed. Each man would carry thirty rounds, half the usual issue, but that was all the cartridges that were left him. The men would carry their thirty rounds, their weapons, their bedroll, and a haversack with as much hardtack and boiled beef as they could carry, but they could carry nothing else. All knapsacks and heavy baggage were to be left south of the Rappahannock under a corporal's guard of wounded and sick men too weak to march.

Daniel Medlicott, whose promotion to major had been Washington Faulconer's final gift to the Legion, came with Sergeant Major Tolliver to make a formal protest at Starbuck's orders. If the Legion met an enemy, they said, then the men could not fight properly with only half an issue of ammunition. Starbuck, nervous at this first challenge to his authority, had delayed the confrontation by stooping to his campfire and lighting himself a cigar. "We'll just have to fight twice as hard then," he said, trying to turn away their unhappiness with levity.

"It isn't a joke, Starbuck," Medlicott said.

"Of course it isn't a joke!" Starbuck snapped the rejoinder louder than he had intended. "It's war! You don't give up fighting just because you don't have everything you want. The Yankees do that, not us. Besides, we ain't fighting alone. All of Jackson's men are marching with us."

The Sergeant Major looked unhappy but did not press the argument. Starbuck suspected Medlicott had talked the Sergeant Major into joining a protest that arose more from Medlicott's pique than from a genuine concern, and Medlicott, Starbuck conceded, did have cause to feel misused. For one day the miller had thought himself the commander of the Faulconer Legion, and then, out of the blue, the man he most disliked in the regiment had been promoted over his head. Medlicott maintained his protest had a more noble aim than salving his hurt pride. "You don't understand," he told Starbuck, "because you're not a local man. But I am, and these are my neighbors"—he waved a hand at the Legion—"and it's my duty to get them home to their wives and little ones."

"Makes you wonder why we're fighting a war at all,"

Starbuck said.

Medlicott blinked at the Bostonian, unsure how to understand the remark. "I don't think we should march," he reiterated his protest heavily. "And it won't be my fault if there's disaster."

"Of course it won't be your fault," Starbuck spoke caustically. "It'll be my fault, just as it'll be my fault if there ain't a disaster." A year before, he thought, his pride in being grammatical would never have allowed him to say "ain't," but now, to his private amusement, his Boston accent was following his allegiance south. "And your duty, Major," he went on, "is not to make sure your neighbors get home, but to make damn sure the Yankees get home, and if the sumbitches don't have the sense to go of their own accord, then your duty is to send them back to their wives and little ones inside boxes. That's your duty. Good morning to you both." He turned away from the two unhappy men. "Captain Truslow!"

Truslow shambled over. "Just Truslow's good enough," he

said.

"Your company's at the rear," Starbuck said, "and you know what to do if you find stragglers." He paused. "And that includes straggling officers." Truslow nodded his bleak assent. In addition to commanding Company H Truslow also had command of the regiment's eight surviving draught horses that had once pulled the ammunition wagons and supply carts. Now, without any vehicles to drag, they would serve as ambulances for the men who genuinely could not keep up the pace.

The Legion marched at dawn. The order to leave their heavy baggage behind had alerted the men to the fact that this was to be no ordinary march, no stroll through the countryside from one bivouac to another, but no one had been prepared for a march as hard as this. Thomas Jackson usually allowed his men a ten-minute rest every hour, but not today. Today they marched without any rest stops, and there were staff officers beside the road to make sure no one dawdled, and there were more staff officers waiting at the first ford to make certain no man paused to take off his boots or roll up his pants. "Just keep marching!" the staff officers shouted. "Keep going! Come on!" The troops obeyed, squelching out of the ford to leave wet footprints that dried swiftly under the hot August sun.

The sun rose still higher. It had been one of the hottest summers in living memory, yet today it seemed as though the heat would reach new heights of discomfort. Sweat drove trickles through the layers of dust that caked men's faces. Sometimes, when the road ran across the summit of a shallow crest, they would see the line of infantry stretching far ahead and far behind, and they guessed that a whole corps was on the march, but where it was going only God and Old Jack knew. They did not march in step but loped along in the gait of experienced infantrymen who knew they would have to endure this agony a whole day through. "Close up!" the sergeants shouted whenever a gap appeared in a company's files, and the call would echo up and down the long shambling line. "Close up! Close up!" They passed parched fields, dried ponds, and empty barns. Farm dogs growled from the road's verges and sometimes started fights with the soldiers' pet dogs; such fights were usually popular diversions, but today the sergeants kicked the beasts apart and beat the country dogs away with rifle butts. "Keep going! Close up!" Every hour or so one of the cavalry patrols that were screening the march from the enemy's horsemen would canter past the Legion on its way to take up new positions far ahead of the long column, and the horsemen would answer the infantrymen's questions by saying they had seen no enemy. So far, it seemed, the Yankees were oblivious to Jackson's men as they moved across the hot summer landscape.

Men hobbled as muscles first tightened and then seized with cramp. The pain began in the calves, then spread to the thighs. Some men, like Starbuck, wore boots they had taken at Cedar Mountain, and within a few miles those new boots had worn men's heels and toes to bloody blisters. Starbuck took his boots off and tied them round his neck, then marched barefoot. For a few hundred yards he left small bloody footprints in the dust; then the blisters dried but went on hurting. His feet hurt, his legs ached, there was a stitch in his side, his throat burned, his bad tooth throbbed, his lips were cracked, his eyes stung with the sweat and dust, and this was just the start of the march.

Some officers rode horses. Swynyard was mounted, as were Major Medlicott and Captain Moxey. Moxey was now back with the Legion. Starbuck had not wanted him, but nor did Swynyard want him to stay as an aide, and so Moxey was now the Captain of Company B. The newly promoted Major Medlicott had gone to Company A with the consolatory honor of commanding the Legion's four right-flank companies. Moxey had the next company, Sergeant Patterson, now Lieutenant Patterson, had command of C, while Murphy's old Lieutenant, Ezra Pine, was now the Captain of D Company. The left four companies had Sergeant Howes, now a Lieutenant, in command of E, a Captain Leighton, who had been borrowed from Haxall's Arkansas regiment to command Company F, Captain Davies took over Medlicott's old Company G, and Truslow, whom Starbuck had insisted on promoting into a full Captain, was in charge of Company H.

It was a ramshackle list of officers, cobbled together from disaster, and the men in the Legion knew it was makeshift and did not like it. Starbuck understood the disquiet. Most men did not want to be soldiers. They did not want to be torn away from home and women and familiarity, and even the most reckless young man's sense of adventure could be quickly eroded by miniй bullets and Parrott gun shells. What held these reluctant warriors to their duty were discipline, friendship, and victory. Give them those things, Starbuck knew, and the men of the Faulconer Legion would believe they were the best damn soldiers in all the damned world and that there was not a man alive or dead, in any uniform in any country of any era, who could lick them in a fight.

But the Legion had no such belief now. Its sense of comradeship had been shattered by Galloway's raid and by the disappearance of Washington Faulconer. Most of the Legion's men had known Faulconer since childhood; he had dominated their civilian lives as he had their military existence, and, whatever his faults, unkindness had never been among them. Faulconer had been an easy master because he had wanted to be liked, and his disappearance had unsettled the ranks. They were ashamed, too, because the Legion was the only regiment that marched without colors. Every other unit marched with flying banners, but the Legion, to its disgrace, had none.

So, as they marched, Starbuck spent time with each company. He did not force himself on them but instead began by ordering them to close up and march faster, and then he would just march alongside and endure the embarrassed or unfriendly looks that told him most of his men believed he was too young to be their commanding officer. He knew those looks did not mean he was unpopular, for in the spring, when the Legion had held its final election for field officers, nearly two-thirds of the men had written Starbuck's name on their ballots despite Washington Faulconer's opposition, but that springtime defiance had not meant they wanted the young Northern rebel to be their commanding officer. Not at twenty-two, and not at the expense of men from their own Virginian community. And so Starbuck marched with them and waited for someone to throw the first question. The conversation he had with Company G was typical enough. "Where are we going?" Billy Sutton, newly made up to Sergeant, wanted to know. "Old Jack knows and he ain't saying." "Are we going to see General Faulconer again?" That question came from a man who had once worked on Washington Faulconer's land and who doubtless wanted to know that his old job would be waiting for him at the war's end.

"Reckon you will," Starbuck answered. "He's just gone on to higher things. Can't keep a man like General Faulconer down, you should know that."

"So where's he gone?" The question was hostile. "Richmond."

There was another silence, except for the sound of boots slapping the road, rifle stocks knocking against tin canteens, and the hoarse rasp of men breathing. Dust drifted off the road to coat the bushes a reddish gray. "Story is that Old Jack gave Faulconer the back of his hand," Sergeant Berrigan asked. "Is that what you hear, Major?"

Starbuck noted the use of his new rank and guessed that Berrigan was a supporter. He shook his head. "Way I hear it is that Old Jack just reckoned General Faulconer could be more use in Richmond. Faulconer weren't never happy with all this marching and sleeping rough, you all know that. He wasn't reared to it and he never got a taste for it, and Old Jack just agreed with him." That was a shrewd enough reply, intimating that Faulconer was not as tough as his men. Most of the Legion did not really want to believe that their General had been dismissed, for that truth reflected on themselves, and so they were ready enough to embrace Starbuck's kinder version of Faulconer's sudden disappearance.

"What about Colonel Bird?" a man asked.

"Pecker'll be back soon," Starbuck assured them. "And he'll have his old job back."

"And Captain Murphy?" another man called.

"Last I heard he was doing real well. He'll be back, too."

The company trudged on. "Are we still the Faulconer Legion?" a corporal asked.

"I reckon," Starbuck said. "Most of us come from there." The answer was an evasion, for given time Starbuck intended to change the regiment's name, just as Swynyard planned to change the Brigade's name.

"They going to make Tony Murphy a major? Like you?" That surly question came from a tall, scowling man called Abram Trent, who sounded deliberately unfriendly. Trent's question suggested that Starbuck's promotion had come too quickly and at the expense of men who were native to Faulconer County.

Starbuck met the question head-on. "Ain't my decision, Trent, but if you reckon I shouldn't be a major then I'll be real happy to discuss it with you just as soon as we stop walking. You and me together, no one else."

The men liked an officer who was ready to use his fists, and Starbuck's offer to fight made them respect him, while the reluctance of any man to take up the offer only increased that respect. Starbuck knew that men like Abram Trent were the centers of resistance to his new and fragile authority, and by facing them down he helped make their defiance impotent. He finished by telling Company G what little he knew about their destination. "Old Jack doesn't march us like dogs for the hell of it, boys. We're on our way to give the Yankees a whipping, so save your breath and keep marching." Battle, he thought, and specifically victory in battle, was the elixir that would restore the Legion's confidence.

But not every man was eager for battle. Late in the morning, when few men had any breath left for questions or answers, Captain Moxey caught up with Starbuck. Moxey had been riding his horse, but now he led the beast by its reins. "I can't go on," he said.

Starbuck gave the sallow Moxey an unfriendly glance. "You look fresh enough to me, Mox'."

"It ain't me, Starbuck, but the horse."

Starbuck edged the sling of his rifle away from the spot on his right shoulder that was being chafed to rawness, though he knew that within seconds the sling would work its way back to the sore spot again. "Your horse ain't in command of a company, Mox', you are."

"She's lame," Moxey insisted.

Starbuck looked at the mare, which was indeed limping slightly on her right rear leg. "So let her loose," he said.

"It ain't probably nothing more than a bad shoeing job," Moxey said, "so if you give me a pass, Starbuck, I'll find a blacksmith in a village near here and catch you up."

Starbuck shook his head. "Can't do that, Mox'. Old Jack's orders. No one's to leave the march."

"I won't be long!" Moxey insisted. "Hell, it's what we've always done on a march." He tried to sound offhand, but only succeeded in being petulant. His family had money, but, as Pecker Bird had always maintained, not quite enough money for its pretensions, just as Moxey did not possess quite enough grace to be a gentleman. There was a perpetual air of grievance in Moxey, as though he resented a world that had inexplicably denied his family the last few thousand dollars that would have made its existence free of all financial worry, while Moxey, the eldest son, lived in terror that one day he might have to work for a living.

Starbuck grimaced as he trod on a sharp-edged stone. He was marching barefoot, and for a pace or two the pain stopped him from speaking. Then the brief agony subsided. "So what is it, Mox'?" Starbuck asked. "You don't want to fight?"

Moxey bristled. "Are you accusing me of cowardice?"

"I'm asking you a goddamned question," Starbuck snapped.

Moxey immediately backed down. "My horse is lame! That's all!"

Starbuck shifted the rifle onto his left shoulder, though immediately the sore spot on that shoulder began to chafe. "The orders are clear, Mox'. If your horse can't keep up, then you're to leave it behind. Put her in a field where some farmer can find her."

"She's a valuable mare!" Moxey protested. "From Faulconer's stud."

"I don't care if she's a goddamned unicorn from the stables of the sun," Starbuck said coldly. "If she can't keep up then she stays behind."

Moxey's anger flared raw. "She ain't a Boston coal hauler's nag, Starbuck. She's real horseflesh. Worth near a thousand bucks."

Starbuck changed his rifle back to his right shoulder. "Just keep up with us, Mox', horse or no horse."

"You can boil your son of a bitch brains," Moxey said and turned angrily away.

Starbuck felt a sudden rush of fresh energy. He turned after Moxey, took him by his elbow, and steered the smaller man forcefully into some trees that grew beside the road. Starbuck made himself smile so that the watching men would not construe the scene as a fight between two officers, but as soon as he had Moxey and his horse safe out of the column's sight, he turned the smile off. "Now listen here, you son of a goddamned bitch. You may not like it, but I'm in charge of this goddamned regiment and you're nothing but a captain in it, and you're going to do what every other man in this regiment has to do. I don't care if you ride your damned horse till she's broke, and I don't care if you leave her here to starve, but I do care that you're leading Company B when we face the damned Yankees. So what are you going to do, Mox'? March or ride?"

Moxey had gone pale. "I ain't going to leave my horse. She's too valuable."

Starbuck pulled his revolver from its holster. "I tell you, Mox'," he said as he thumbed a percussion cap onto one of the cones, "they should have drowned you at birth and saved the rest of us a heap of trouble." He spun the cylinder so that the primed chamber would be the next under the hammer, then placed the revolver at the tired mare's drooping head with the muzzle just above her eyes. "What the hell..." Moxey began. Starbuck thumbed back the hammer as the mare stared at him with her soft brown eyes. "You're a leprous piece of ratshit, Mox'," Starbuck said in a calm voice, "but it just happens that I need you despite that, and if this here mare's the obstacle to you doing your job, why then, the mare'll just have to go to heaven." He tightened his finger on the trigger.

"No!" Moxey dragged the mare away from the revolver. "She'll make it!"

Starbuck lowered the hammer. "Just be sure you make it, too, Mox'."

"Goddamn it! You're mad!"

"And I'm your commanding officer too, Mox', and I reckon it's a wise thing not to upset commanding officers, especially mad commanding officers. Next time it'll be your brains, not the mare's." Starbuck lowered the revolver's hammer, then jerked his head toward the road. "Get back to your company."

Starbuck followed Moxey back to the road. Company H was just passing, and Truslow spat toward Moxey's disconsolate figure. "What was that about?" he asked Starbuck.

"Mox' and me were just looking at his horse. Deciding whether it could make the distance."

"It could go on forever," Truslow said scathingly, "so long as he takes the damn stone out of its hoof." "Is that all it is?"

"What the hell did you think it was?" Truslow seemed not to be affected by either the day's heat or the speed of the march. He was one of the oldest men in the Legion, but also the toughest. He did not much care for being made into an officer, because rank had always been a matter of indifference to Truslow, but he did care about Starbuck, whom he perceived as being a clever man and a cunning soldier. "You need to watch Moxey," he said.

"I guessed as much," Starbuck said. "I mean really watch him." Truslow moved a wad of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. "He's Faulconer's pet, and Faulconer won't want us to succeed." Starbuck shrugged. "What can Moxey do about that? He doesn't even want to be here, he just wants to run away."

"He's a sly one," Truslow said. "He's like a dog. He needs a master, see? And now that Faulconer's gone he'll like as not shove his nose into Medlicott's pocket." Truslow sniffed. "You hear the rumor that Medlicott is putting around? He says that if he'd kept command of the Legion we wouldn't be fighting with Jackson, but sitting in the trenches at Richmond. Says it's a fact."

"Like hell it is," Starbuck said, wincing as the weight of the rifle dug into his shoulder.

"But it's the kind of rumor men believe if they get unhappy," Truslow said, "and it ain't any good pretending that everyone in the Legion wants you to be in charge. You forget how many men in this regiment depend on Washington Faulconer for a living. They cut his trees, fish his streams, take his wages, keep their money at his bank, and live in his houses. Look at Will Patterson." Truslow was referring to the newly promoted commander of C Company. "Patterson's been trying to become an officer ever since the fighting began," Starbuck said. "He should be grateful to me!"

"That family ain't grateful for nothing!" Truslow said. Sergeant Patterson, the son of a stonemason in Faulconer Court House, had twice tried to win election to officer but had failed both times. Starbuck was not certain Patterson would make a good officer, but there had been no one else he could promote. "And a good half of the Patterson business comes from Washington Faulconer," Truslow went on, "so do you think Will Patterson can afford to be your supporter?"

"So long as he fights," Starbuck said, "that's all that matters."

"But Medlicott, Moxey, and Patterson," Truslow said pointedly, "are in charge of your three right-hand companies. So just how hard do you think those boys will fight when matters get bloody?"

Starbuck thought about that observation and did not like what he was thinking. He kept his conclusion to himself, grinning at Truslow instead. "Some people like me," he said.

"Who?"

"Coffman."

"He's a boy, too young to know better."

"Swynyard?"

"Madder than a rabid bat."

"Pecker?"

"Madder than two rabid bats."

"Murphy."

"Murphy likes everyone. Besides, he's Irish."

"You?"

"I like you," Truslow said scornfully, "but just what kind of recommendation do you think that is?"

Starbuck laughed. "Anyway," he said after a few paces, "we're not here to be liked. We're here to win battles."

"So make sure you do," Truslow said, "make goddamn sure you do."

The tired, hot men received a respite when they came close to the Rappahannock. So far the army had inarched well to the south of the river, but now they were turning north to march past the Yankees' flank. The river's northern bank was a bluff up which the road climbed steeply, and one of Jackson's eighty guns had stuck on the slippery bank. The teamsters used their whips, and the nearest infantry were summoned to put their shoulders to the gun wheels, but the delay inevitably backed the column up, and the grateful men collapsed beside the road to rest their aching legs and catch their breath. Some men slept, their faces given a corpselike look by the dust coated on their skin. Moxey surreptitiously removed the stone from his mare's hoof, then sat beside a glum-looking Major Medlicott. Most of the Legion's other officers gathered around Starbuck, hoping to glean more information than he had given to their men, but Starbuck insisted he did not know where they were going.

"It'll be the Shenandoah Valley," Captain Davies opined, and when no one contradicted him or even asked why he held the opinion, he explained it anyway. "That's Old Jack's backyard, right? He's a terror in the Shenandoah. Once the Yankees know we're in the Shenandoah, then they'll have to split their army in two."

"Not if they decide to let us rot in the Shenandoah," the newly promoted Lieutenant Howes commented.

"So we won't rot there, but cross into Maryland," Davies suggested. "Up the Shenandoah, straight across the Potomac and over to Baltimore. Once we've got Baltimore we can attack Washington. I reckon a month from now we could be running Abe Lincoln out of the White House on one of his Own fence rails."

Davies's confidence was greeted with silence. Someone spat in the road, while another man tilted his canteen to his mouth and held it there in hope of finding one last trickle of tepid water. "Down the Shenandoah," Truslow finally said, "not up."

"Down?" Davies asked, puzzled by the contradiction. "Why should we march south?"

"Down's north and up's south," Truslow said, "always has been and always will be. You go to the valley and ask the way up and they'll send you south. So we'll be going down the Shenandoah, not up."

"Up or down," Davies said, offended by the correction, "who cares? We're still going north. It'll be a two-day march to the Shenandoah, another two to the Potomac, and then a week to Baltimore."

"I was in Baltimore once," Captain Pine said dreamily. Everyone waited to hear more, but it seemed Pine had nothing to add to his brief announcement.

"Up!" Starbuck saw the battalion in front being ordered to their feet. "Get your lads ready."

They crossed the river and headed north. They did not follow the road, which here tended westward, but marched over fields and through woods, across shallow streams and wide paddocks, following a shortcut that at last brought the column to a dirt road leading northward. Starbuck held a hazy map of Virginia in his head, and he sensed how they were now marching parallel to the Blue Ridge Mountains, which meant that just as soon as they reached the Manassas Gap Railroad they could turn west and follow the rails through the pass into the Shenandoah Valley. And that valley was aimed like a gun at the hinterland of Washington, so maybe the excitable Davies had it right. Starbuck tried to imagine the fall of Washington. He saw the ragged rebel legions marching through the conquered ring of forts that surrounded the Yankee capital and then, under the eyes of the silent, shocked spectators who lined the streets, parading past the captured White House. He heard the victory music and saw in his mind's vivid eye the starcrossed battle flag flying high above the white, plump, and self-satisfied buildings, and when the victory parade was finished, the soldiers would take over the captured city and celebrate their triumph. Colonel Lassan, the Frenchman, had spent a week in the North's capital and had described the city to Starbuck. It was a place, Lassan had said, devoid of hard sinews. There was no industry in Washington, no wharves, no factories, no steam-driven mills to scream their whistles and shroud the sun with their filth. It was, Lassan said, a small city with no purpose but to manufacture laws and regulations; an artificial city where slyness passed for intelligence and venality replaced industry. It was peopled by pale lawyers, plump politicians, rich whores, and faceless hordes of black servants, and when the rebels marched in, the lawyers and politicians would doubtless be long gone, which meant that only the good souls would be left behind. That tantalizing prospect served to keep Starbuck's mind off his blistered feet and burning muscles. He dreamed of a soft city, of captured champagne, of wide beds and starched white sheets. He dreamed of fried oysters and turtle soup and roast beef and tenderloin steaks and peach tarts, all of it eaten in the company of the lawyers' rich Washington whores, and that tantalizing thought suddenly reminded him of the golden-haired woman he had glimpsed in her husband's open carriage behind the Yankee lines at the battle of Bull Run. She lived in Washington and had invited Starbuck to visit her, but now, for the life of him, he could not remember her name. Her husband had been a Northern congressman, a pompous and dim-witted man, but the wife had been golden and beautiful, a vision whose memory was lovely enough to console a weary man marching through the small Virginia towns where excited people applauded as their soldier boys went by. Year-old rebel flags, hoarded through the months when the Yankees had been the nearest troops, were hung from balconies and eaves, while small boys brought the troops buckets of tepid well water to drink.

Starbuck's pains seemed almost numb by the time the sun began to sink behind the serrated peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ahead of him he saw the soldiers taking off their hats, and he wondered why so many would make that gesture, and then a staff officer cantered back along the line of march calling out that the men were not to cheer. "We don't want any Yankee cavalry scouts to hear us," the staff officer said, "so no cheering."

Cheering? Why no cheering? Starbuck, his thoughts wrenched back from imagined Washington luxuries to his wretched, sweating reality, suddenly saw a poker-backed figure standing atop a house-sized rock beside the road. It was Jackson, hat in hand, watching his troops march by. Starbuck instinctively straightened his shoulders and tried to put some spirit into his step. He snatched the ragged, sweat-stained hat off his long black hair and stared at the hard-faced man, who, seeing Starbuck, gave the smallest nod of recognition. Behind Starbuck the Legion pulled off their hats and fell into step to march past the legendary General. No one cheered, no one said a word, but for the next mile it seemed to Starbuck that there was an extra spring in every man's pace.

They marched on into the evening. The western sky was a livid crimson streaked with gold, a blaze of color that slowly shrank and faded into a gray twilight. The marching pains came back, relieved now by the slow fall in the day's fierce temperature. The men looked for signs of bivouacs that would tell them they had arrived at their destination, but no troops were camped beside the road and no campflres drifted smoke into the evening; instead the march went on and on into the darkness. The moon rose to whiten the dust that coated the Legion's rifles and clung to the men's skin. No one sang, no one spoke, they just marched on and on, mile after damned mile under a gibbous moon. To their right, far off, a great red glow showed where the smear of Yankee cooking fires covered the northern Virginia counties, and Starbuck, trying to keep himself alert, realized that Jackson's army was already north of most of that glow, which surely meant that the enemy was outflanked, and for the first time he wondered if they were indeed planning to turn west into the Shenandoah. Maybe, he thought, they would turn east instead, to plunge like a dagger into the Yankee rear.

"In here! In here! No fires!" A voice startled Starbuck out of his reverie, and he saw a horseman gesturing toward a night-dark meadow. "Get some rest." The horseman was evidently a staff officer. "We'll be marching at dawn. No fires! There's a stream at the bottom of the hill for water. No fires!"

Starbuck acknowledged the orders, then stood in the meadow's gate to watch the Legion shamble past. "Well done!" he called out to each company. "Well done." The men scarcely acknowledged his presence, but just limped into the meadow that lay at the crest of a small hill. Moxey kept on the far side of his company so he would not even have to acknowledge Starbuck's existence.

Truslow's company went past last. "Any stragglers?" Starbuck asked.

"None that you need know of."

Starbuck walked beside Truslow into the meadow. "A hell of a march," he said tiredly.

"And tomorrow we probably do it again," Truslow said. "You want me to set a guard?"

Starbuck was tempted to accept the offer, but he knew the men of Company H would think he had picked on them because they were his old company, and so he deliberately chose Company A instead. Major Medlicott was too tired to

complain.

Starbuck limped round his men's bivouac. He wanted to make certain that they had water to drink, but most had already fallen asleep. They had simply lain down on the grass and closed their eyes, so that now they lay like the dead collected for burial at battle's end. A few walked to the stream to fill their canteens, a few smoked, a few gnawed at hardtack, but most of the men just lay sprawled in the moonlight.

Starbuck stayed awake with the pickets. To the south the moon shone on yet more men tramping up the road, but one by one the regiments turned into the fields to snatch their brief rest. The regiments were still coming when Starbuck woke Medlicott to relieve him, and still marching when he lay down to sleep. He dreamed of marching, of pain, of a sun-bitten day spent sweating northward on a stone-hard road that led, not to whores on white sheets in a fattened city, but to battle.

On the morning that Jackson's army marched west Major Galloway received orders to report to General McDowell, whose troops formed the right wing of Pope's army. An odd and disquieting report had come from that western flank. One of General Banks's staff officers had been spying the enemy positions from a hill north of the Rappahannock and had spotted a distant column of mixed infantry and artillery marching westward on the river's far bank. The road the rebels were following snaked up and down through hilly country, so that the staff officer could only glimpse scattered parts of the column, but he had estimated the number of regiments by counting their flags and reported that the rebel force must have numbered at least twenty thousand men. The column had eventually disappeared in the heat haze that shimmered over the distant farmland and woods.

General Banks forwarded the report to General McDowell, who in turn sent it on to General Pope with an added comment that the column was probably aiming to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and then advance north through the Shenandoah Valley. Maybe, McDowell surmised, the rebel force planned to attack the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, then cross the river and threaten Washington?

Pope added the report to all the other disquieting evidence of rebel activity. Jeb Stuart's horsemen had raided one of the army's forward supply depots at Catlett's Station. The rebel horse had swarmed out of a rainswept night like fiends from hell, and though the raid had done little real damage, it had made everyone nervous. There were more reports of rebel activity on Pope's eastward flank near Fredericksburg, while other observers saw clear signs that the rebels were planning a direct assault across the Rappahannock River. General Pope felt like a juggler given one Indian club too many, and so he sent a stream of peremptory telegrams to the War Department in Washington demanding to know when he might expect McClellan's forces to join his own, then rattled off a series of orders designed to repel all the threatened attacks at once. Union troops marched and countermarched under the hot sun, none of them knowing quite what they were doing or where the enemy was supposed to be.

It was the cavalry's job to determine the enemy's position, and so Major Galloway was ordered to report to General McDowell, who in turn instructed him to lead his men into the swathe of empty country that lay between the Northern army and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was into that hazy spread of land that the mysterious enemy column had been seen marching, and McDowell wanted Galloway to find it, but just as Galloway was ready to leave, a new order arrived from General Pope's headquarters. It seemed a party of rebel horsemen had recently crossed Kelly's Ford, and Galloway was ordered to find out where that enemy was headed.

The Major demanded a map. It took him a long time to discover Kelly's Ford. He had somehow expected it to be near Warrenton, where McDowell's forces were anchored, but instead he found it to be fifteen miles away on the army's eastern flank. He protested the stupidity of one cavalry regiment being required to be in two places at once, but was told that most of the army's cavalry was either immobilized through lack of fodder or else was busy. Galloway stared down at the map. "Which job's the most important?" he asked.

Pope's staff officer, a Colonel, scratched in his beard. "I reckon that if the Johnnies are crossing Kelly's Ford, then they'll be planning to cut us off from McClellan's boys." He ran a nicotine-stained finger up from the ford to show how a rebel force could cut Pope's men off from Aquia Creek, where McClellan's army was coming ashore. "They'd split us up. And that'd be bad. Real bad."

"And this other column?" Galloway asked, gesturing toward the western landscape.

The Colonel squashed a louse between two nicotine-stained thumbnails. In truth he had no idea which threat was the greater, but nor did he want to consult his master, who was already in a furious mood because of the constant stream of conflicting intelligence reports that were confusing all his careful plans. "My guess," the Colonel ventured, "and it is only a guess, mark you, is that the seceshers are dragging a false trail. They probably want us to weaken ourselves by sending men to the Shenandoah Valley. But the war isn't going to be won in the Shenandoah, but here, on the river lines." He slapped the map across the band of rivers that barred the roads between Washington and Richmond. "But on the other hand, Major"—the Colonel was too canny not to qualify his judgment—"we sure would like to know just what in tarnation those twenty thousand Johnnies are doing. And everyone says your boys are the best for that kind of job. They say you can ride behind the enemy lines, isn't that right?"

So Galloway had no choice but to split his small force. If the threat at Kelly's Ford was the more dangerous, then that justified using two troops of men, and so Galloway decided to go there himself and to take Adam's troop with him, while Billy Blythe would take his men and investigate the mysterious western column. "You ain't to get in a fight, Billy," Galloway warned Blythe. "Just find out where in hell the rebs are headed and then get word back to McDowell."

Blythe seemed happy with his orders. His horses were tired and hungry, but he did not have so far to ride as Galloway, and once in the saddle, his men rode slowly. They headed into an empty countryside that was parched by an afternoon sun that burned like a furnace. Blythe led his troop a few miles west of the last Union pickets and then stopped at the summit of a small hill to stare into the empty landscape. "So just what in hell are we doing, Billy?" Sergeant Kelley asked Blythe.

"Chasin' our tails, Seth. Just chasin' our born-again tails." Sergeant Kelley spat in disgust. "So what if the enemy are out here? Hell, Billy, our horses ain't been fed proper in three days and they ain't been rested proper neither. You reckon we can outrun Jeb Stuart's boys on these nags?" The men murmured their agreement.

Blythe waved at the serene, heat-hazed countryside. "What enemy, Sergeant? Do you see an enemy?"

Kelley frowned. There was a smear of dust way off to the northwest, but that was so far beyond the Rappahannock that it was surely being kicked up by Northern troops, while to the west, where the mysterious column had supposedly disappeared, there was nothing but trees and sun-glossed fields and gentle hills. "So what the hell are we doing here?" the Sergeant asked again.

Blythe smiled. "Like I told you, Seth, chasin' our tails. So why in hell's name don't we do something more useful instead? Like give our horses a proper feed." He tugged at his reins, turning his horse's head south. "I seem to remember a farm not so far away. A den of rebel vipers, it was, but there was fodder there and maybe it didn't all burn up to hell and I reckon you and I have got unfinished business there."

Kelley grinned. "You mean that Rothwell woman and her children?"

"I hate children," Blythe said, "I do so hate young children. But their mothers?" Blythe smiled. "Ah, I do so love a ripe young mother."

Twenty miles to the east Major Galloway found Kelly's Ford guarded by a strong rebel garrison on the southern bank. That garrison sniped ineffectually at Galloway's horsemen as they explored the northern side of the river, where they discovered no hoofprints nor any other evidence of a rebel force across the river. The local black population, always the best source of information for Northern scouts, said that no Confederates had crossed the river in two days, and those men had only come across to get fodder for their horses. Galloway dutifully searched the riverbank for five miles east and west, but neither he nor Adam found any rebels. The rumor had been false, and Galloway, knowing his day had been wasted, rode slowly home.

A dozen miles north of the ford was Warrenton Junction, where the branch rails from Warrenton joined the main Orange and Alexandria line. Confusion besieged the junction. Two trains loaded with guns and ammunition were trying to pass south to the Bealeton depot, while another was trying to haul twenty-four boxcars loaded with hardtack, uniforms, percussion caps, and artillery shells down to Warrenton. Meanwhile three empty trains and a hospital train waited in the pitiless sun for clearance northward. The sweet smell of pinewood lay over the depot, coming from the log stacks that waited to feed the locomotive furnaces.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck's passenger car was attached to the hospital train. The preacher escaped the heat in the car's stifling interior by walking up and down in the train's long shadow, where he was forced to watch as a succession of newly dead men were carried from the red-flagged cars. The men were not dying from their wounds but from heat prostration, and their fate angered the Reverend Elial Starbuck. These were good, decent young Americans who had gone to fight for their country, and their reward was to be dumped beside a rail track where their corpses crawled with flies. If the hospital train did not move soon, then every sick man in the cars would be dead, and so the Reverend Starbuck discovered an engineer colonel who appeared to possess some authority over the railroad and of whom he demanded to know when the trains would be cleared north. "In Boston," the Reverend Starbuck assured the Colonel, "we have such things as timetables. We find them useful."

"In Boston, sir," the Colonel retorted, "you don't have Jeb Stuart." The delay on the railroad was caused by the raid Stuart had made on Catlett's Station, the next depot on the line, where the rebel cavalry had taken scores of prisoners, captured a paychest, and even snaffled up General Pope's best uniform coat. A teeming rain had prevented the raiders from burning the bridge that carried the rails over Cedar Run, yet even with the bridge intact the raid had inflicted chaos on the rail schedule. "But your train will be the first one north tomorrow afternoon," the Colonel promised the Reverend Starbuck. "You'll be in Washington by Wednesday, sir."

"I had hoped to be in Richmond by then," the Reverend said caustically.

The Colonel bit back any retort, and instead arranged for the hospital cars to be moved into the shade of a warehouse and for water to be brought to the surviving wounded. Some fugitive slaves who were now employed as laborers on the railroad were ordered to dig graves for the dead.

The Reverend Starbuck wondered if he should witness for Christ to the laboring blacks but decided his mood was too bleak for effective evangelism. His opinion of the army had slipped all week but now reached fulminating bottom. In all his born days he had never witnessed any organization so chaotic, so incapable, or so sluggish. The smallest Boston grocery shop displayed more managerial acumen than these uniformed incompetents, and it was no wonder that the lumpen-skulled rebels were making such fools of the North's generals. The preacher sat on the open platform at one end of his passenger car, and as the sun sank huge in the west, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and took on the pleasurable chore of making notes in his diary for a pungent letter he planned to send to the Massachusetts congressional delegation.

Five miles away, in Warrenton itself, Major Galloway reported to the army headquarters. He found the same Colonel who had dispatched him that morning and who now seemed disappointed that no enemy had crossed Kelly's Ford. "You're sure," the Colonel asked.

"Certain. Absolutely certain."

The Colonel scratched at his beard, found a louse, and squashed it between his thumbnails. "What about the twenty thousand Johnnies in the west?" the Colonel asked.

"I sent my second-in-command that way, but he hasn't reported yet."

The Colonel yawned, then stretched his arms. "No news is good news, eh? If your fellow had found anything he'd have doubtless sent word. And no one else is squealing about twenty thousand rebels, so it's probably all moonshine, pure moonshine. Which reminds me." He turned in his chair and reached for two glasses and a whiskey bottle.

"You'll join me? Good." He poured the whiskey. "But even if there are twenty thousand Johnnies loose, what damage can they do?" He paused, thinking about his question, then laughed at the very thought of the whole United States Army being frightened of such a tiny force. "Twenty thousand men," he said disparagingly, "what harm can they do?"

Captain Davies woke Starbuck. "Reveille, sir."

Starbuck thought he had to be dreaming. No, worse, he thought he was not dreaming. His muscles were strips of pain, his bones were set solid.

"Starbuck! Up!" Davies said.

Starbuck groaned. "It's dark."

"They want us marching in twenty minutes."

"Oh, no, Jesus no," Starbuck muttered. He groaned again, then turned onto one side. The mere effort of rolling over hurt. Everything hurt. He could not bear to think of trying to stand on his blistered feet.

"Water." Davies, who had taken over picket duty from Medlicott, offered Starbuck a canteen. Starbuck drank, then felt for a cigar. He had two left, both preserved from harm by being wrapped in his hat. He borrowed Davies's cigar to light one of his own, then coughed some life into his lungs.

"Jesus," he said again, then remembered he had to set an example, and so he struggled to his feet. He blasphemed again.

"Stiff?" Davies asked.

"Why didn't I join the cavalry?" Starbuck asked, then tottered a few steps. It was night-dark still, without even a hint of dawn in the eastern sky. Stars were bright overhead, while the moon hung low above the Blue Ridge to mark its forested draws deep black and starkest white. He sat to pull on his boots. It hurt just to tug them over his raw feet. "Awake?" Colonel Swynyard's voice asked.

"I think I died and went to hell," Starbuck said as he forced himself to stand again. "Maybe that's it, Colonel. Maybe none of this is real. We're all in hell."

"Nonsense! We're heavenbound, praise Him."

"Then I wish He'd hurry," Starbuck complained. Around him the field heaved and groaned as waking men realized the ordeal that waited for them. Starbuck scratched at a louse, transferred the one remaining cigar to his pocket, pulled the hat onto his head, slung his rolled blanket over his left shoulder and the rifle on his right, and thus was ready to start.

Breakfast was taken on the march. For Starbuck it was a slate-hard slab of hardtack that gnawed at his aching tooth. He tried to remember when he had last had a decent meal. His uniform trousers were belted with rope that gathered in at least five inches of material that had been well stretched before the war's first battle. Then the blisters on his feet began hurting again and the sore spot on his right shoulder began to chafe, and he forgot about food and just concentrated on walking through the pain.

The column still marched north. Once, when the road rose to offer a view of the moonlit western hills, Starbuck saw the notch that marked where the Manassas Gap carried the railroad through the Blue Ridge and into the fertile Shenandoah Valley. In the moonlight the gap looked a far way off, and Starbuck's spirits fell at the thought of marching all that long way. His muscles were slowly unknotting, but only to hurt even more. The Legion passed between two rows of houses, their windows dimly lit with candlelight. A tethered dog barked at the passing soldiers, and an unseen woman called from a window to offer the soldiers her blessings.

Then, abruptly, the road climbed a steep few feet, and Starbuck almost tripped on a steel rail. He recovered his footing and stepped safely over the metal to realize that the Legion had at last reached the Manassas Gap Railroad. The road divided here, one branch climbing west toward the Blue Ridge and the other going east toward the Yankees. A mounted staff officer dominated the junction, and he was pointing the troops east. So they were not going to the Shenandoah Valley after all but were instead to march toward the rising sun that climbed through the vast smear of smoke marking where a waking army's cooking fires burned. They were to march east toward battle.

The sun rose like hellfire in their eyes. It dazzled them and cast their shambling shadows long on the dusty road behind. Every now and then Starbuck would see the rails of the Manassas Gap Railroad lying alongside the road like twin streaks of reflected fire, but no trains ran on those strips of molten steel. All the locomotives and stock had been taken south or else commandeered by the Yankees to shuttle their supplies from Alexandria through Manassas Junction to their forces on the Rappahannock.

And now, Starbuck realized, Stonewall Jackson was behind those forces. And maybe, Starbuck thought, the Yankees knew he was coming, for how could twenty-four thousand men hope to avoid a hostile army's scouts? Ahead of the marching column lay a low range of hills, so low that in peacetime the hills would scarcely have been noticeable, but Starbuck could see that the apparently innocuous slopes were more than steep enough to check an infantry attack. And if the Federals had put guns in the dark trees at the crest of those hills, then Jackson's long march must end in bloody defeat.

The road and the empty railroad arrowed side by side toward a pass through the low hills. Jackson's cavalry advanced either side of the rail embankment, their carbines cocked as they nervously watched every fence and wood and house. The passage through the unregarded hills was called Thoroughfare Gap, and if the Yankees had been shadowing Jackson's march, then Thoroughfare Gap was the place to put their ambush, and as the steep walls of the pass narrowed, the horsemen advanced ever more slowly and cautiously. They tried not to think of hidden gunners waiting with taut lanyards or of lines of concealed infantry poised with loaded rifles. Every creak of a saddle or rustle of wind or clatter of a horseshoe on stone startled the scouting horsemen's nerves; then suddenly they reached the pass's summit and the whole eastern countryside lay open before them, and it was empty. There were no limbers, no guns, no caissons, no Federals at all. There was nothing but low hills and thick woods stretching into the long blue distance. Stonewall Jackson had hooked his small army clean and undetected into the Yankees' unprotected belly.

Now all he had to do was twist the hook and start the killing.

"Close up!" the officers shouted. "Close up!" The men marched in silence, too tired to talk or sing. From time to time a man would break ranks to snatch a green apple or an ear of unripe corn from the farmlands on either side of the road, while other men broke ranks to be ill behind a hedge, but always they hurried on after their comrades and pushed themselves back into line. The horses pulling the guns labored under the whips, and their guns' wheels ripped the road's surface into broken ruts that turned men's ankles, but still they marched at the same cracking pace behind a cavalry vanguard that, late in the morning, rode into a small town where a Federal band was practicing in the main street. The band belonged to a regiment that had gone on a daylong route march, leaving their musicians to entertain the sullen Virginian townspeople. Those sullen people cheered up as the band fell slowly silent. The music ended with one last astonished and froglike grunt of a saxhorn tuba as the musicians realized that the horsemen in the street were pointing guns straight at their heads. The bandsmen had been assured that they were at least twenty miles from any enemy forces, yet now they were faced by a gray-coated pack of grinning men on dusty, sweat-foamed horses. "Let's hear you play Dixie, boys," the cavalry leader ordered. Some of the bandsmen began to edge backward, but the cavalry officer cocked his rifle one-handed and the bandmaster hastily turned around, raised his hands to ready the musicians, and then led them in a ragged rendition of the rebel anthem.

In the middle of the afternoon, with the musicians now silent prisoners under guard, General Jackson's column struck southeast on a wide road that passed through harvested fields and plundered orchards. The men could guess where they were going now, for ahead of them was a great moving plume of smoke that showed where the Orange and Alexandria Railroad carried the Northern army's supplies south to the Yankee troops. Every bullet, every cartridge, every slab of hardtack, every percussion cap, every shell, every pair of boots, every bayonet, every small and large thing that an army needed to fight was being carried down that single track, and Jackson's leading infantry was now within earshot of the wailing, whippoorwill cadence of the locomotives' whistles. They could even hear the distant and rhythmic clatter of car wheels crossing the rail joints.

The trains were running out from Manassas Junction, which lay only a few miles to the north. For a time Jackson had been tempted by the thought of marching directly on the Junction, but it seemed inconceivable that the largest Federal supply base in Virginia would not be guarded by earthworks and guns and regiments of prime infantry, so instead the General planned to cut the railroad at Bristoe Station, which lay just four miles south of the depot. Local people said that Bristoe Station was guarded by a mere handful of cavalry and only three companies of Northern infantry.

Dusk was falling as the leading rebel infantry breasted a slight rise and started down the long slope to Bristoe. Rebel cavalry had ridden ahead of the infantry, but those horsemen were nowhere in sight, and all the leading infantry could see were the twin rails gleaming empty in the day's dying light and a scatter of clapboard houses from which kitchen smoke trickled skyward. The small garrison had no idea that danger threatened. A Northern cavalryman, stripped to the waist and with his suspenders dangling, carried a canvas pail of water from a well to a horse trough. Another man played a fiddle, assiduously practicing the same phrase over and over again. Men smoked pipes in the small warm breeze or read hometown newspapers in the last light of the setting sun. A few men saw the infantry on the western road, but they assumed the approaching soldiers must be Federal troops. The infantry's flags were flying, but the sinking sun was huge and red behind the rebel column, and so the Yankees could make out no details of the approaching banners or uniforms.

The leading rebel regiment was from Louisiana. Its Colonel gave the order for his men to put percussion caps on the cones of their loaded rifles. Till now they had marched with their guns unprimed in case a stumbling man set off a cartridge and so alerted the enemy. "I guess we arrived here before the cavalry," the Colonel said to his adjutant as he scraped his sword clear of its scabbard.

The sound of the steel on its scabbard's throat seemed to release the village to hell. For just as the Colonel pulled his sword into the sun's scarlet light, so the hidden rebel horsemen launched their charge from a belt of trees north of the settlement. Bugles ripped the sky and hooves pounded the earth as a screaming line of rebel cavalry broke from cover and stormed down on the village.

The man with the pail of water stood frozen for a second. Then he dropped the pail and ran toward a house. Halfway there he changed his mind and ran back toward his tethered horse. More Northerners mounted up and, abandoning everything except their weapons, fled eastward. A few of the Yankee horsemen were too late and were trapped in the small village as the rebel cavalry thundered into the single street. A Northerner wheeled his horse and cut with his saber, but before his stroke was half completed, a Southern blade was in his belly. The Southerner rode on, dragging his saber free from the clinging flesh.

Rifles crashed and smoked from the houses where the Northern infantry had taken cover. A horse and man went down, their blood splashing together across the dusty road. The Southern cavalry fired back with revolvers until their Colonel shouted at them to forget the sheltering infantry and capture the rail depot instead.

Another volley splintered from the houses, and a horseman was snatched back from the saddle. His comrades spurred on to the depot, where scattered groups of Northern infantry gathered under the water tower and alongside the fuel bunkers where the pine logs were stacked. The largest group of Yankees rallied around the green-painted shed where a terrified telegrapher was sheltering under the table rather than sending a message. The man was still cowering with his head in his arms when the victorious Southern horsemen scattered the infantry and threw open the shed's door and ordered the telegrapher out. "I ain't done nothing!" the telegrapher called desperately. He had been too frightened to send any message, so that no Northerner yet knew that the army's vital rail line was severed.

"Come on, Billy!" The horseman pulled the telegrapher out into the dusk, where the victorious Southern horsemen were chasing the last of the Northern garrison out into the fields.

Behind them a cheer sounded as the Louisiana infantry swept into Bristoe's single street. A volley of shots crashed and splintered into a house where a group of Yankee infantry still tried to defy the attackers, but then the village's other defenders began to call out their surrender. The Louisiana men ran from house to house, yanking blue-coated soldiers out into the street. One last stubborn Yankee fired at the attackers from a shed behind a general store and received a full company volley for his pains, and then the firing in the village died away. A few shots still sounded in the field beyond the railroad, but otherwise the fighting had ended, and Stonewall Jackson had hooked clean behind John Pope and cut his eighty thousand men off from their supplies.

It was a feat that had been achieved by just twenty-four thousand men, who, on bloodied feet and with aching muscles and dry mouths and empty bellies, now marched into Bristoe. It was a summer's evening, and the light was fading into a warm soft darkness. They had marched more than fifty miles across country to sever the Yankees' supply line, and soon, Jackson knew, the stung Northerners would turn on him like fiends. Which was exactly what Lee wanted the Northerners to do. Lee wanted Pope's army to abandon its well-dug earthworks behind the Rappahannock's steep northern bank, and Jackson's job was to lure them out. Jackson's men were now the bait: twenty-four thousand vulnerable men isolated among a sea of Northern troops.

Which all added up, Jackson reckoned, to the probability of a pretty rare fight.

To the south of the depot a train whistle offered its mournful sound to the falling night. Smoke misted the sky; then a locomotive's lamp appeared around a bend to glimmer its shivering reflections on rails that had begun to quiver from the thunder of the approaching wheels. The train, unsuspecting, steamed north to where a rebel army and a Yankee nightmare waited.