Battle Flag

***

THE LEGION MARCHED INTO BRISTOE just as the train rounded the bend south of the depot. The doors of the locomotive's firebox were open so that the flames were reflecting bright on the underside of the long, rolling plume of smoke. The train was traveling so slowly that Starbucks first thought was that it planned to make a stop at the depot; then a fountain of sparks whirled from the tall stack as the locomotive accelerated. There was just enough light remaining in the day for the engineer to have seen troops milling about the station, and, suspecting trouble, he pulled his whistle cord in warning and threw the regulator hard across to put all the locomotive's power into the great driving wheels. The reflected glow of the furnace disappeared as the firebox doors were slammed shut. The locomotive was hauling a light load: just two sleeper cars showing red flags to denote they were carrying wounded men, a passenger car that was routed through to Alexandria, and a mixture of unladen gondolas and boxcars that would be unhitched in Manassas junction to be loaded with guns and ammunition for the next day's southward run.

There was a disorganized flurry of activity in the depot as rebel infantry seized whatever obstacles lay close to the track and hurled them across the rails. The most substantial blockage was formed from a pile of ties and rails that had been stacked ready for repair work and that were now hurriedly thrown into the locomotive's path.

The whistle sounded again. The bell was clanging incessantly, a tocsin of alarm in the darkness, while the rails were shaking with the weight of the approaching train. "Get back! Get back!" officers shouted, and the rebel soldiers scurried away from the tracks that were now bright with the reflected light cast by the locomotive's huge kerosene lamp. The windows of the passenger car flickered washes of yellow light over the fuel bunkers and water tower. Two rebels dropped a last length of rail over the track, then scrambled for their lives as the train thundered into the depot. The gilded and scarlet-painted locomotive plowed through the smaller barricades, splintered a heap of barrels and fence rails, scattered a cord of firewood as though the pine logs were mere twigs; then the engine flashed through the lamplit depot with its pistons pounding and its tall stack churning out a torrent of spark-ridden smoke. The engineer hauled on the whistle's chain as the kerosene lamp illuminated the ominous barricade of steel rails and massive timber ties that lay just beyond the depot. The train was still accelerating. Watching rebels held their breath in anticipation of spectacular disaster, then cheered as the locomotive's wooden cowcatcher struck the barrier, but the heavy barricade simply disintegrated in the face of the speeding train. There was a cascade of sparks from the front wheels, a tumbling of wooden baulks and clanging rails, a crash as the locomotive's lantern shattered into scraps of glass and metal, then the defiant whistle sounded once again as the train buffaloed its way through the remnants of the makeshift barrier and sped on northeast toward Manassas.

Passengers had peered anxiously out of the car windows as the train swayed and rattled through the depot, but the faces vanished when a handful of rebel soldiers opened fire. A bullet clanged off the locomotive, another severed a steam line, while a dozen windows in the hospital and passenger cars were shattered. Most of the bullets were fired at the boxcars, which the rebels fondly imagined contained a fortune in plunder that was being denied them. The train, safe through the obstacles, was sounding its whistle continually as a warning to the Federal troops ahead, though to the rebels the whistle sounded more like a mocking call of victory. The locomotive rumbled over the bridge that crossed the Broad Run stream just north of the depot, then disappeared into woods, and the caboose's twin red lanterns were the last things the rebels saw as the train hurried away. Men began firing at those lamps until officers shouted at them to cease fire.

The rumble of the rails died, then, mysteriously, swelled again. A staff officer had ridden a hundred yards south to where a small hillock offered a view, and now he cupped his hands and shouted back to the station. "Another train coming!"

"Pull up the track!" a second staff officer ordered. Just north of the depot, where the rails ran on top of an embankment toward the stream, an officer had discovered the trunklike box where the repair crews kept their tools, and suddenly the embankment was swarming with men carrying sledgehammers and crowbars.

The second train was still a mile away, but its rhythmic noise swelled drumlike in the night as the first lengths of rail were lifted and thrown aside. The work became more effective as it was organized; some troops were detailed to knock aside the chairs that held the rails to the ties, while others heaved the loosened rails off the track and down the embankment's slopes. Staff officers ordered the men not employed in lifting rails to hold their fire so that the approaching train would not be warned of danger.

"You'll get a passel of them through now," an elderly civilian observed to Starbuck. The Legion's help was not needed to destroy the line, so its men were standing in the village street, from where they hoped to get a prime view of the destruction. "They run 'em up empty this time of evening," the old man went on. "Then they start hauling 'em back again all night and day. One-way traffic, see? Empty this way, full that. You boys come far?"

"Far enough."

"Right glad to see you. Yankees are too high and mighty for my taste." The old man grinned as the new train sounded its whistle to warn the depot of its approach. "That first one'll be pulling into Manassas right now. Guess those Northern boys there will be pissing themselves with worry. They told us we'd never see you boys again! Leastwise not till they marched you through as prisoners."

The locomotive whistle sounded again. Men scattered away from the embankment as staff officers cleared the milling soldiers from the depot so that the engineer of the approaching train would not be alerted to his danger by the sight of a waiting crowd. The locomotive thudded into sight. It was hauling a train of boxcars that rattled and swayed under the moonlit smoke.

Starbuck looked down at the old fellow who had spoken to him. "Are you saying that first train will be in Manassas by now?" he asked.

"It's only an hour's walk that way." The old man pointed northeast. "Train does it in ten minutes!"

Ten minutes, Starbuck thought. He was that close to where Galloway's Horse had its lair? My God, he thought, but what pleasure there would be in doing to Galloway's house what Galloway's men had done to McComb's Tavern. Then he pushed that apprehension of revenge aside as the train thundered into the village. "Hold your fire!" an officer shouted from somewhere down the line. "Hold your fire!"

Starbuck saw some of his own men level their rifles. "No firing!" he shouted. "Guns down!"

But the target was irresistible. The men nearest Starbuck lowered their guns, but a score of others fired, and suddenly the whole village crackled with rifle fire. On board the locomotive the fireman's first reaction was to jump to the tender and haul on the hand brake, and for a second there was a shower of sparks from the protesting machinery, but then the engineer realized his danger and shouted for the brakes to be released as he poured more steam into the driving wheels. The train lurched forward with gouts of steam hissing from a score of bullet holes that surrounded the locomotive with a lamplit halo of vapor through which the boxcars were dragged toward the embankment.

The engineer ducked to shelter from the rifle fire and so never saw the missing track ahead of his train. His locomotive was still accelerating as it plowed off the end of the rails. For a few seconds the whole train kept going in a straight line as dirt and stones spewed in a dark wave beneath the locomotive's churning wheels, but then the boxcars began to concertina and tumble, and the locomotive rolled slowly over, spilling fire as it slid down the embankment. The boxcars piled into a heap of twisted frames and shattered planks. Jackson's men cheered as the destruction continued, and still cheered as the commotion ended. The engine had stopped a few yards short of the bridge over Broad Run, while, fifty yards behind, the last dozen boxcars still stood upright on the undamaged track. The wrecked train had no caboose; instead a pair of red-lensed oil lamps glowed at the back of the last boxcar. Some men began to tear open the undamaged cars, hoping to find Yankee luxuries to replace the stone-hard biscuit, hard green apples, and unripe scavenged corn they had eaten in the last two days. Rightly or wrongly every Southerner believed that no Yankee could go to war without a larder of delicacies on his back, and so the rebels splintered the cars open in hopes of finding a lavish supper, but the wagons were all empty.

A whistle sounded in the dark. "Another train!" The staff officer watching from the hillock to the south of the station shouted the warning.

"Get back! Back!" Officers and sergeants pushed the disappointed plunderers away from the wrecked train, while other men stamped out the fires that had been sparked when the locomotive spilt down the embankment. Cavalry helped clear the scene so that the crew of the oncoming train would suspect nothing.

"Hold your fire this time!" A bearded officer rode along the line of grinning soldiers. "Hold your fire!"

"Son of a bitch won't keep coming with those lights burning." Truslow appeared beside Starbuck and nodded toward the stalled boxcars, where the twin red lamps still glowed to reflect on the steel rails. Truslow waited for someone to realize the fact, but no one seemed to have noticed the lamps, so he took matters into his own hands by running across the strip of waste ground that separated the rail line from the nearest houses. A cavalryman saw the running figure and wheeled his horse to intercept. "Let him be!" Starbuck shouted.

Truslow reached the train, unhitched his rifle, and swung its brass-hiked butt into the two lanterns. There was a tinkle of glass, and the twin lights vanished just seconds before the new train rocked around the western bend. A hush fell over the watching men as the train steamed past the hillock, clattered over some switchgear that led to an unused siding, vented smoke around the water tower, and then hurtled into the dim yellow light cast from the lanterns hanging in the depot. No one fired a rifle. The engineer leaned from his cab to wave a greeting to anyone who might be in the depot but saw no one and so sounded his whistle instead. The engineer was anticipating the comforts of Manassas, where he and his fireman would cook their supper by grilling two steaks on a greased shovel held in the locomotive's firebox. Afterwards they would play cards and drink some liquor in the engineer's shed before hauling a heavy train of ammunition south in the early morning. Both men were professional Pennsylvanian trainmen who had volunteered to serve in the U.S. Military Railroad, where the money was good, the liquor plentiful, the whores cheap, and the danger, they told each other constantly, pretty much minimal.

The engineer was still thinking of shovel-grilled steaks as his locomotive struck the remnants of the first train. The cowcatcher lifted up the rearmost boxcar, catapulting the vehicle high enough to scrape along the top of the boiler and shear the lamp, smokestack, steam dome, and bell clean off the locomotive. The impact of the third train collapsed the remaining cars of the second; then the deadweight of the moving boxcars piled into the crash and drove the locomotive deeper into the wreckage. The wheels finally jumped the rails, and the locomotive slid sideways to a halt. There was a passenger car behind the tender, and screams sounded from the chaos as the boxcars crashed in behind. The last boxcars stopped upright in the depot itself, while deep among the wreckage at the front of the train a fierce fire started to burn. On either side of the track, well out of danger's range, men were whooping with joy.

"Another train!" the staff officer called from the hillock, and once again a whistle sounded from the darkness.

"We'll do this all night!" Truslow was unusually animated. There was a brute joy in such freedom from all the customary and careful regulations of normal life.

A squad ran to the depot to extinguish the rear lamps of the stalled train. Other men doused the depot's own lights so that the oncoming train would not glimpse the boxcars standing among the buildings. Deep among the burning wreckage smoke hissed from the locomotive. Men were trying to extricate the crew and passengers as well as extinguish the fires as the fourth train of the night rocked into sight with its lantern flaring yellow-white in the ever-blackening darkness.

"Come on, you son of a bitch!" Truslow growled.

But instead of a third crash there was a scream of brakes as the engineer scented trouble ahead. Maybe it was the darkened depot, or perhaps it was the unextinguished fires that still flickered in the wreckage, but something made the engineer apply his brakes. The wheels locked to skid down the rails through a fountain of flowing sparks. The locomotive stopped just short of the hillock, and the engineer rammed it into reverse gear and released the steam. Smoke poured from the stack as the machinery labored to push the great train backward. The staff officer on the hillock dragged his revolver free and spurred toward the locomotive that was now spinning its wheels. The officer's horse reared away from a jet of steam; then the wheels began to bite and the tons of steel and iron and wood began to crawl away southward. The staff officer fired at the cab and shouted at the engineer to halt, but the engineer kept the regulator fully open, and the protesting cars gathered speed and the rhythm of the locomotive became faster and faster as the train backed safely away. The staff officer fired again, but the train was now moving quicker than his horse could gallop, and so he abandoned the chase and just watched as the train disappeared into the dark with its whistle screaming shrilly. It was clear no more trains would come this night, and so Jackson ordered his men back into the depot. There was work to do. The survivors had to be brought out of the two wrecked trains, the bridge north of the village had to be destroyed, and the prisoners had to be interrogated. The lanterns in the depot were lit once more, and the General paced up and down beneath their feeble light as he gave his orders.

The survivors of the train wrecks were brought to the depot. Confederate surgeons worked on the wounded while food and water were fetched from the houses. One Northerner, a burly and white-haired civilian dressed in an expensive suit and with a seal-hung gold watch chain stretched across his ample vest, heaved himself onto an elbow to stare across the track at the rebel officers in the depot. The civilian had a new bandage around his head and a splint on his left leg. He stared for a long time, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the skinny, bearded, unkempt, and plain-uniformed man who snapped his orders in a high-pitched voice. The Northerner finally beckoned one of the rebel soldiers to his side. "Son, who is that?"

"That's Stonewall, sir," the soldier said, and then, seeing that the civilian was weak and in pain, he knelt and supported the man's head. "That's Old Jack, sir, large as life."

The wounded man stared at the ragged figure who carried no insignia of rank and whose headgear was nothing but a cadet's shabby cap. The Northerner was a bureaucrat from Washington who was returning from a visit to discuss General Pope's supply problems. He was a man accustomed to the high, imperious style of officers like John Pope or George McClellan, which was why he found it so hard to believe that this unprepossessing figure with its tangled beard and threadbare coat and torn boots was the bogeyman who gave waking nightmares to the whole United States Army. "Are you sure that's Jackson, son?" the bureaucrat asked.

"I'm sure, sir, dead sure. That's him."

The civilian shook his head sadly. "Oh, my God," he said, "just lay me down." A gust of laughter echoed from the nearby soldiers.

Jackson, across the tracks, frowned at the laughter. The General was listening to a brigadier who was assuring him that the Yankees had tons of ammunition, a treasure-house of equipment, and a cornucopia of food stuffed into the warehouses at Manassas Junction. "But they ain't got nothing more than a corporal's guard to watch over it all," the brigadier asserted, "and by morning, General, they'll have a ton of boys out of Washington to keep us at bay. And the sons of bitches, excuse my language, General, are only four miles away. Let me take my two regiments, General, and I'll give you Manassas by dawn."

"With just two regiments?" Jackson asked skeptically.

"With my two regiments, General, I could take hell by storm, let alone a supply depot." The brigadier paused. "You want to talk to the man?" He jerked his head toward the captured engineer who had revealed just how small was the garrison and great the prize at Manassas Junction.

Jackson shook his head, then paused a second. "Go," he finally said, "go."

Because the night was still young, and the mischief merely beginning.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck had been an impatient passenger on the first train that left Warrenton Junction for the North. The rails were supposedly clear, yet even so the train made miserably slow progress. In New England, as the preacher proudly informed his traveling companions, the rails were capable of continuous high-speed travel, but he supposed army railroad management combined with Southern construction techniques had rendered the Orange and Alexandria Road incapable of matching the unsurpassed efficiency of the Boston and Albany. "Sixty miles an hour is not unusual in New England," the Reverend Starbuck declared.

A civilian engineer spat into a cuspidor and declared that a coal-burning locomotive of the Illinois Central had been timed at over seventy miles an hour. "Long way from New England, too," he added pointedly.

"Doubtless it was going downhill," the preacher responded, "or perhaps the timing watch was manufactured in Richmond!" He was pleased with that riposte and could not resist laughing aloud. Night was falling, glossing the car's windows with reflected lamplight. The preacher settled the bundled rebel flag more comfortably on his lap and tried to see some detail of the countryside, but just as he put his face to the glass, the train gave a sudden jerk and began to speed up.

The engineer pulled out his watch. "Just ten minutes to Manassas Junction," he said. The rhythm of the steam engine quickened as the car rattled faster and faster over the jointed rails to shake the brass cuspidors and vibrate the gas-jet flames behind their misted lamp globes. "I suppose you'd call this a snail's pace in New England, Reverend?" the engineer called across the car. The lanterns of a depot flashed by in the half-darkness; then, just as the Reverend Starbuck was about to respond to the engineer's taunt, the window beside him collapsed in a shower of broken glass. For a terrifying few seconds the preacher was certain the train was derailed and crashing. Eternity seemed suddenly imminent; then he heard men whooping outside, and there was the alarming sight of gray uniforms and a heart-stopping glimpse of rifle flames flashing in the dark. The train gave a violent lurch, but somehow kept going. A woman passenger screamed in fear.

"Keep down!" an artillery officer shouted from the front of the car. Another window was smashed and a bullet ripped into the stuffing of the empty seat opposite the preacher, but then the train was running free into the welcome darkness beyond the depot. The wheels thundered over a bridge as the locomotive's whistle and bell sounded their warning.

"Is anyone hurt?" the artillery officer called as passengers' heads cautiously surfaced above the seat backs. The rush of air through the broken windows guttered the lamp flames and scattered the pages of a newspaper along the central aisle. "Anyone hurt?" the officer demanded again. "Sing out now!"

now!

"By God's grace, no," the Reverend Starbuck answered as he shook spicules of broken glass from the folds of the flag. He was still picking the scraps from the precious silk as the wounded locomotive panted and groaned into Manassas Junction.

"All off now!" an imperious voice commanded the passengers. "Everyone off! Bring your luggage! Everyone off!" The ambushed car had been bound for the Alexandria depot, hard across the river from Washington, and the Reverend Starbuck had been looking forward to an early departure from the capital on the cars of the Baltimore and Ohio. At Baltimore he planned to take a horse-drawn tram across town to the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Road, where he would find a car bound for New York. Once in New York he would abandon the railroads for a cabin on one of the fast and comfortable Boston steamships, but now it seemed his journey was again to be delayed. "Take your luggage, folks!" the man ordering everyone off the train called.

The Reverend Starbuck's carpetbag was now considerably heavier than when he had first come south. It was true that he had distributed all his abolitionist tracts, but in their place he had gathered some valued souvenirs of battle. None, to be sure, was as precious as the great silken banner, but nevertheless he had discovered some objects with which he expected to excite Boston's curiosity. Packed in his carpetbag were two gray rebel caps, one with a bullet hole and the other satisfyingly stained with blood, a zinc plug from an unexploded shell, a revolver with a barrel shattered by a cannonball, the knucklebone of a dead rebel, and a rusting belt buckle with the initials CSA stamped clearly on its face. The heaviest of his souvenirs were copies of Southern newspapers: ill-printed on crudely made paper and containing editorials of an evil that even the Reverend Doctor Starbuck found breathtaking. It all added up to a considerable weight that he lugged off the train before accosting the young Captain who had so peremptorily ordered the passengers off the car. "You're preparing another train?" the preacher demanded.

"For what?" the Captain retorted, turning around from the open window of the telegraph office.

"For Washington, of course!"

"For Washington? My God, uncle, you'll be lucky! Don't suppose anything will move now till first light. If there are bushwhackers at Bristoe then God knows where else they might be."

"I have to be in Washington by morning!" the preacher protested.

"You can walk," the Captain said rudely. "It isn't a step more than twenty-five miles, but there won't be any more trains tonight, uncle. And in the morning I daresay they'll be sending troops down from Washington." He paused. "I guess you can wait for one of those trains to go back? But this train isn't moving anyplace, not till it's been in the workshops for repairs." He turned back to the telegrapher. "What do they say?"

The telegrapher eased back from his machinery, which was still stuttering tinnily. "They want to know how many raiders, sir."

"Well?" the Captain demanded of the train's engineer, who was standing behind the telegraphers. "How many bushwhackers did you see?"

"Two or three hundred?" the engineer suggested uneasily.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck cleared his throat. "They were not bushwhackers," he said sternly, "but rebel soldiers. I saw them clearly."

The Captain gave the elderly minister a tired look. "If they were troops, uncle, they'd have cut the telegraph. But they haven't, which makes me think they're amateurs. But we've told the army what's happening, so there's no need to worry."

"They've cut the wire now, sir," the telegrapher broke in. "Just this second, sir." He jiggled his key, but nothing came back. "Line's still open to Alexandria, but everything's dead to the south of us, sir."

"So what are we to do?" one of the dispossessed travelers demanded plaintively.

The Captain grimaced. "You might get rooms at Micklewhite's Tavern here, but if Mick's full you'll have to leg it into Manassas town. It's not far up the track, or there's a road beyond the wagon park."

If the Reverend Elial had wanted rest and shelter, he would have used Major Galloway's house, which lay not far beyond the town, but he had no mind for creature comforts this night. Instead, with his ebony cane clutched firmly in his right hand, and with the flag and carpetbag clasped awkwardly in his left, he set out in search of some officer who might pay him more attention than the glib young Captain. The depot itself hardly encouraged his hopes, for it consisted of nothing but great, dark buildings hastily thrown up on the foundations of the warehouses burned by the rebels when they had abandoned the depot earlier in the year, while here and there among the dark monstrosities a sentry's brazier fought the night with a small red glow. Between the huge warehouses were weed-strewn rail spurs where more materials were stored in boxcars and where long, low gondola cars carried brand-new field guns. The moon silvered the cannons' long barrels, and the Reverend Starbuck wondered why the guns were here instead of pounding the rebels into submission. The war, he decided, was being prosecuted by half-wits.

He left the warehouses behind and stumped through a wagon park toward the lights of the nearby town. A lesser man than the Reverend Elial Starbuck might have hesitated before entering the town's main street, for the place was raucous with drunks. Most of the drinkers were railmen, but there were plenty of black folk among them, and the sight of the Negroes angered the Reverend Starbuck. Where, he wondered, were the missions? And where the Christian teachers? The town had been declared an official refuge for escaped slaves, but by the evidence before his eyes it seemed that the Negroes would have been better off in servitude than being thus exposed to debauchery, uncleanness, and liquor. There would need to be changes!

He asked a soldier where the commander of the garrison might be found and was directed to a guardroom attached to the post office. A lieutenant scrambled to his feet as the Reverend Starbuck entered, then answered the preacher's query by saying that Captain Craig was absent. "He's gone to look to our defenses, sir. It seems there are bandits on the rail line south, sir."

"More than bandits, Lieutenant. The raiders are rebel troops. I saw them with my own eyes. Infantry, definitely rebel infantry. I saw the same scum at Cedar Mountain, so I know of what I speak."

"I'll make sure Captain Craig hears what you have to say, sir." The Lieutenant spoke respectfully, though he was privately dubious about the preacher's report. There had been rumors of rebel raiders near Manassas every night for the last two weeks, but none of the rumors had proved true, and the Lieutenant doubted whether a minister of the gospel could tell the difference between rebel soldiers and bushwhackers, especially as even the best-dressed rebels looked little better than cutthroat outlaws. "But not to worry, sir," the Lieutenant continued, "Captain Craig ordered our artillery and cavalry to deploy, and he put all our infantry on alert." The Lieutenant decided it might be wiser not to add that there were only eight cannon in the defenses, aided by a mere hundred cavalrymen and a single company of infantry. Manassas was supposed to be a safe posting, as safe as garrison duty in Maine or California. "I don't think our sleep will be disturbed, sir," the Lieutenant said soothingly.

The Reverend Starbuck was pleasantly surprised to discover that at least one officer seemed to have performed his proper duty this night. "Captain Craig? Is that his name?" The Reverend Starbuck had taken out his diary and was now penciling a note. "He's done well, Lieutenant, and I like to report commendable behavior when I encounter it."

"His name is Captain Samuel Craig, sir, of the 105th Pennsylvania," the Lieutenant said, wondering just how important this authoritative minister was. "You report to the government, perhaps, sir?"

"I report to the greatest government that ever ruled on this earth, Lieutenant, or on any other," the Reverend Starbuck said as he finished writing his note.

"Then maybe you'd like to add my name, sir?" the Lieutenant said eagerly. "It's Gilray, Lieutenant Ethan Gilray of the Provost Guard. Just the one L, sir, and thank you for asking." Gilray waited as the minister penciled his name. "And will you be wanting quarters for the night, sir? There's a Mrs. Moss in Main Street, a most Christian woman who keeps a very clean house. For a Virginian."

The Reverend Starbuck closed his diary. "I shall wait in the passenger depot, Lieutenant." Much as he was tempted by a clean bed, he dared not miss the chance of a northbound train, yet before he returned to the depot he still had one Christian obligation to discharge. "The Provost Guard is responsible, is it not, for discipline?" the Reverend Starbuck asked. "Indeed it is, sir."

"Then I shall have no alternative but to report you for the grossest dereliction of duty, Lieutenant, a duty that is Christian before it is military. There are Negroes in town, Lieutenant Gilray, who have been permitted access to inebriating liquor. Would a loving parent put ardent spirits in the way of his children? Of course he would not! Yet the Negroes came to Manassas on just such a promise of protection, a promise made by our government that you, as that government's representative, have broken by allowing them to fall prey to the temptation of strong drink. It is a disgrace, sir, a shameful disgrace, and I shall make certain that our authorities in Washington are made fully aware of it. Good day to you." The Reverend Starbuck left the speechless Gilray and went back into the night. He felt better for that discharge of his duty, for he was a fervent believer that each man, every day, should leave the world a better place than he found it.

He walked back through the town, listening to the drunken songs and seeing the scarlet women who lifted their skirts in the stinking alleys. He fended a drunk off with his cane. Somewhere in the dark a dog whined, a child cried, a man vomited, and a woman screamed, and the sad sounds made the Reverend Starbuck reflect on how much sin was souring God's good world. Satan, he thought, was much abroad in these dark days, and he began to plan a sermon that likened the Christian life to a military campaign. Maybe, he thought, there was more than a sermon in that idea, but a whole book, and that pleasant thought kept him company as he strode down the moonlit road toward the depot. Such a book would be timely, he decided, and might even earn him enough to add a new scullery to the house on Walnut Street.

He had already planned his chapter headings and was beginning to anticipate the book's adulatory notices when suddenly, shockingly, the sky ahead of him flashed red as a cannon fired. The sound wave crashed past him just as a second cannon belched flame that briefly illuminated a rolling cloud of gunsmoke; then the Reverend Starbuck heard the chilling and ululating sound that he had mistaken at Cedar Mountain for Aristophanes' paean. He stopped, knowing now how the devil's noise denoted a rebel attack, and he watched in disgust as a scatter of blue-coated soldiers fled from the depot's shadows. Northern cavalrymen were galloping between the dark buildings, and fleeing infantrymen were running along the rail lines. The Reverend Starbuck listened as the rebels' foul paean turned into cheers, and then, to his chagrin, he saw gray coats in the moonlight and knew that the devil was scoring yet another terrible victory in this summer's night. A brazier was tipped over, causing fire to flare bright between two warehouses, and in the sudden flamelight the Reverend Starbuck saw the satanic banner of the Southern rebels coming toward him. He gaped in horror, then thought of the greater horror of being captured by such fiends, and so he hid the captured flag under his coat and, stick and bag in hand, turned and fled. He would seek shelter in Galloway's house, where, hidden from this rampaging and seemingly unstoppable enemy, he would pray for a miracle.

The Legion marched at dawn. They were hungry and tired, but their steps were lightened by rumors that the warehouses at Manassas had been captured and that all the hungry men in the world could be fed from their contents.

Starbuck had last seen the Manassas depot wreathed in smoke when the Confederates had destroyed the junction. The Legion, indeed, had been the very last rebel infantry regiment to abandon Manassas, leaving the warehouses nothing but ashes, yet as the depot came into view, Starbuck saw that the great spread of buildings was now more extensive than ever. The Northern government had not just replaced the burned warehouses but had added new ones and built fresh rail spurs for the hundreds of freight wagons that waited to be hauled south, but even those new facilities were not enough to hold all the Northern supplies, and so thousands of tons of food and materiel had to be stored in hooded wagons parked wheel-to-wheel in the fields beyond the warehouses.

A staff officer spurred back down the marching column. "Go get your rations, boys! It's all yours. A present from Uncle Abe. All yours!"

The men, invigorated by the thought of plunder, quickened their pace. "Slow down!" Starbuck shouted as the leading companies began to break away from the rest. "Major Medlicott!"

The commander of A Company turned in his saddle and offered Starbuck a lugubrious expression.

"We'll take the end warehouse!" Starbuck pointed to the easternmost part of the depot, which was still clear of rebel troops. He feared the chaos that would result if his regiment was scattered among a score of warehouses and mixed with revelers from a dozen other brigades. "Captain Truslow!" he shouted toward the rear of the column. "I'm relying on you to find ammunition! Lieutenant Howes! I want pickets around the warehouse! Keep our men inside! Coffman? I want you to find some local people and discover where the Galloway farm is."

Yet for the moment there was no time to consider revenge on Galloway's Horse, only to plunge into the stacks of boxes and barrels and crates that were piled in the vast, dim warehouse and inside the adjacent boxcars and wagons. It was a hoard that the hard-pressed Confederate army could only dream of possessing. There were uniforms, rifles, ammunition, haversacks, belts, blankets, tents, saddles, boots, bridles, percussion caps, gum rubber groundsheets, picket pins, telegraph wire, signal flags, and lucifer matches. There were candles, lanterns, camp furniture, drums, sheet music, Bibles, buckets, oilcloth capes, jars of quinine, bottles of camphor, folding flagpoles, bugles, replacement pay books, friction fuses, and artillery shells. There were spades, axes, augurs, saws, bayonets, cooking pots, sabers, swords, and canteens.

Then there was food. Not just army-issue hardtack in boxes and desiccated soup in canvas bags, but luxuries from the wagons of the Northern army's sutlers, who made their money by selling delicacies to the troops. There were barrels of dried oysters and casks of pickles, cakes of white sugar, boxes of loose tea, slabs of salt beef, sacks of rice, cans of fruit, sides of bacon, jars of peaches, combs of honey, bottles of catsup, and flasks of powdered lemon. Best of all there was coffee, real coffee; ready-sweetened coffee, baked, ground, mixed with sugar and packed into sacks. There were also bottles of liquor: rum and brandy, champagne and wine, cases and cases of wine and spirits packed in sawdust and all disappearing fast into thirsty men's haversacks. A few conscientious officers fired revolvers into the cases of liquor in an effort to keep their men from drunkenness, but there were simply too many bottles for the precaution to be of any effect.

"Lobster salad, sir!" Private Hunt, his dirty face smeared from ear to ear with a pink confection, offered Starbuck a knife blade loaded with the delicacy from a newly opened can. "Came from a sutler's wagon."

"You'll make yourself sick, Hunt," Starbuck said.

"I hope so, sir," Hunt said. Starbuck tried the proffered salad and found it delicious.

Starbuck wandered in a daze from one store bay to the next. The supplies seemed to have been stacked without any system, but just crammed into the warehouse in whatever order they had arrived from the North. There were cartridges from Britain, tinned food from France, and salt cod from Portugal. There was lamp oil from Nantucket, cheese from Vermont, and dried apples from New York. There was kerosene, medical sulfur, calcined magnesia, sugar of lead, and laxatives made of powdered rhubarb. There was so much material that if two armies the size of Jackson's force had plundered the depot for a month, they could not have opened every box or explored every dusty stack of crates.

"What you can't carry away, we'll have to burn," a staff officer called to Starbuck, "so search it well!" and the Legion, like small boys released to a toyshop, splintered open the crates and whooped with glee at every fresh discovery. Patrick Hogan of C Company was distributing officers' shoulder boards, while Cyrus Matthews was cramming his face with a nauseating mix of dried apple and chipped beef. One man had discovered a cabin trunk that seemed to contain nothing but chess sets, and he was now disgustedly scattering knights, rooks, and bishops as he dug down in search of greater treasures. Bandmaster Little had found a box of sheet music, while Robert Decker, one of the best men in Truslow's company, had discovered a cased match rifle, precision-made for a marksman and equipped with a barrel-length telescopic sight, a hair trigger, a separate cocking trigger, and a small pair of legs at the barrel's muzzle to support the weapon's huge weight. "It'll kill a mule at five hundred paces, sir!" Decker boasted to Starbuck.

"It'll be heavy to carry, Bob," Starbuck warned him.

"But it'll even things against the sharpshooters, sir," Decker answered. Every rebel hated the Yankee sharpshooters, who were lethally equipped with similar long-range target rifles.

Captain Truslow had commandeered two brand-new seven-ton wagons that both carried small brass plates proclaiming them to be the products of Levergood's Carriage Factory of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were boxes attached to the wagon sides that were filled with repair tools, lanterns, and cans of axle grease, and Truslow, always reluctant to concede that anything could be well made in the hated North, nevertheless admitted that the Levergood's Company built a half-decent vehicle. The two gray-painted wagons would replace the old ammunition carts burned in Galloway's raid, and Truslow had his men busy stacking the wagon beds with boxes of rifle ammunition and crates of percussion caps. The draught horses were fitted with brand-new collars, hames, and traces, then backed into the shafts.

Captain Pine's men were distributing boots, while Lieutenant Patterson's company was handing out sacks of coffee. Captain Davies's company was employed in taking down the barn doors from a warehouse; the doors were needed as ramps so that a Georgian artillery battery could maneuver some brand-new Northern cannons off their gondola cars. The Georgians were presently equipped with Napoleon twelve-pounders that were, in their commander's word, "tired," but now they would be armed with a half-dozen Parrott twenty-pound rifles so new that the packing grease from the foundry was still sticky on their barrels. The artillerymen wrecked the wheels and spiked the vents of their old guns, then dragged away their new weapons, each of which displayed a neatly stenciled legend on its trail: PROPERTY OF THE USA.

Colonel Swynyard watched the plunder from horseback. He had helped himself to a brand-new saddle and was sucking on a strip of beef jerky. "Sixteen men," he said gnomically to Starbuck. "Sir?"

"That's all we lost to straggling. Out of the whole Brigade! And most of them will turn up, I don't doubt. Some other brigades lost hundreds." Swynyard grimaced as the strip of beef aggravated a sore tooth. "I don't suppose you came across any false teeth, did you?" "No, sir, but I'll keep a lookout."

"I think I'll have Doc Billy take all mine out. They're nothing but trouble. I confess, Starbuck, that my new faith in Almighty God is shaken by the existence of teeth. Do your teeth hurt?" "One does."

"You probably smoke too much," Swynyard said. "Tobacco smoke might be good for keeping the lungs open, but I've long believed that the juice of the weed rots the teeth." He frowned, not for the thought of tobacco juice, but because a train whistle had sounded in the warm morning wind. Swynyard gazed toward the northern horizon, where a billow of smoke showed above distant trees. "We've got company, I guess," Swynyard said.

The thought of Northerners reminded Starbuck that Stonewall Jackson would not have marched fifty miles in two days just to replenish his army's stock of ammunition and food. "Does anyone know what's happening?" Starbuck asked the perennial soldier's question.

"I'm told that General Jackson is not given to confiding in his inferiors," Swynyard said, "or in his superiors either, for that matter, so I can only guess, and my guess is that we've been sent here as bait."

"Bait." Starbuck repeated the word flatly. It did not sound good.

"I'm guessing that we've been sent up here to pull the Yankees out of their defenses on the Rappahannock," Swynyard said, then paused to watch a soldier shake loose yards and yards of mosquito netting, "which could mean that in a few hours we'll have every blessed Yankee in Virginia trying to kill us." He finished, then stared northward to where a brisk rattle of rifle fire had sounded. The volley was followed by the heavier sound of artillery. "Someone's getting thumped," Swynyard said with a bloodthirsty relish, then twisted in his saddle to watch a sad procession come into sight beside the warehouse. A group of rebel soldiers were escorting a long line of black men and women, some crying but most walking with a stiff dignity. "Escaped slaves," Swynyard explained curtly.

A woman tried to break away from the column but was shoved back into place by a soldier. Starbuck counted almost two hundred of the slaves, who were now ordered to form a line close beside a captured portable forge. "What they should have done," Swynyard said, "is keep running north of the Potomac." "Why didn't they?"

"Because the Yankees declared Manassas a safe refuge for contrabands. They want to keep the darkies down here, you see, south of the Mason-Dixon line. It's one thing to preach emancipation, but quite another to have them living in your street, ain't that the case?"

"I don't know, sir." Starbuck grimaced as he saw a leather-aproned blacksmith test the heat of the forge's furnace. The portable forge was a traveling blacksmith's shop mounted on the back of a heavy wagon that could travel with the army and shoe horses or provide instant repairs to broken metal. The smith dragged a length of chain out of a barrel, and Starbuck immediately understood what was about to happen to the recaptured slaves.

"So how many blacks live in your father's street?" Swynyard demanded.

"None, except for a couple of servants." "And has your father ever had a black at his dinner table?" "Not that I know of," Starbuck said. A hammer clanged on the anvil. The smith was fashioning manacles out of barrel hoops, then brazing the open manacles onto the chain. Heat shimmered over the small open furnace, which was being fanned by two soldiers pumping a leather bellows. Every minute or so a recaptured slave was forced to the forge to have one of the newly made manacles closed around an ankle. A huge-bellied captain with a bristling black beard was supervising the operation, cuffing the slaves if they showed any resistance and boasting how they would suffer now they had been recaptured. "What happens to them?" Starbuck asked.

"You can never trust a black that's run away," Swynyard said, speaking with the authority of a man born into one of Virginia's oldest slave-trading families. "It don't matter how valuable he is, he's been spoilt for good if he's tasted a bit of liberty, so they'll all get sold down the river." "Women too?"

The Colonel nodded. "Women too. And children." "So they'll all be dead in a year?"

"Unless they're real lucky," Swynyard said, "and die sooner." Being sold down the river meant going to the sweated chain gangs on the cotton plantations of the deep South. Swynyard looked away. "I guess my two boys had the good sense to keep on running. They ain't here, anyway, I looked for them." He paused as the gunfire to the north reached a crackling crescendo. Powder smoke was whitening the sky, indicating that a skirmish of some severity was taking place, but the fact that no staff officers were demanding reinforcements from the troops rifling the depot suggested that the enemy was well in hand. "Right now," Swynyard said, "I'd guess that we've just got a few odds and ends coming to attack us. The real attack won't hit till tomorrow."

"Something to look forward to," Starbuck said dryly. The Colonel grinned and rode on, leaving Starbuck to stroll among his happy men. There was no grumbling now about missing a chance to join the Richmond garrison; instead the Legion was reveling in its chance of loot. Captain Moxey had found some frilled shirts and was pulling them on one above another to save himself the trouble of cramming them into a haversack already stuffed with tins of chicken in aspic. Sergeant Major Tolliver had unpacked a whole case of long-barreled Whitney revolvers and was attempting to stow as many as possible in his clothing, while Lieutenant Coffman had discovered a handsome black cloak edged with blue silk braid that he swirled dramatically around his body. At least two men were already blind drunk.

Starbuck dragged one of the drunken men off a case marked "Massachusetts Arms Co. Chicopee Falls." The man groaned and protested, but Starbuck snarled at him to shut up, then levered the case open to find a shipment of Adams .36-caliber revolvers. The guns, with their blued barrels and cross-hatched black-walnut grips, looked deadly and beautiful. Starbuck discarded the clumsier long-barreled Colt he had taken from a dead New Yorker at Gaines Mill and helped himself to one of the new revolvers. He was just loading the last of the Adams's five chambers when a chorus of shouts erupted from further down the warehouse. Starbuck turned to see an excited mob of his men chasing an agile black figure, who swerved around an astonished Coffman, leaped over an opened crate of canteens, and would have got clean away had not the drunk beside Starbuck reached out an oblivious hand that inadvertently tripped the fugitive. The boy—he was hardly more than a boy—sprawled in the mud, where he was pounced on by his cheering pursuers.

"Bring the bastard here!" Major Medlicott strode down the warehouse carrying a teamster's whip.

The prisoner yelped as Abram Trent cuffed him around the head. "Goddamned nigger thief!" Trent had the boy by one ear and was hitting him with his free hand. "Thieving black bastard."

"Enough!" Starbuck pushed a man aside. "Let go of him."

"He's a thieving—"

"I said let go of him!"

Trent reluctantly let go of the boy's ear, but not without giving the captured fugitive a last savage blow. The boy staggered but managed to stay on his feet. He looked around for an escape, realized he was trapped, and so adopted a defiant air. He had a thin face, long black hair, a straight nose, and high cheekbones. He was dressed in a sailor's bell-bottom pants and a billowing striped shirt that gave him an exotic look. Starbuck had once spent a few weeks with a traveling troupe of actors, and there was something in the boy's flamboyance that reminded him of those distant times. "What's your name?" Starbuck asked him.

The boy looked up at his savior, but instead of showing gratitude, he spat. "Ain't got a name."

"What's your name?" Starbuck insisted again, but only received a truculent glare for answer.

Medlicott pushed through the ring of men. "Stay out of this, Starbuck!" he said, raising the whip against the black lad.

Starbuck stepped in front of Major Medlicott. He kept a smile on his face as he put his mouth close to Medlicott's right ear, and he kept smiling as he spoke softly, so softly that only Medlicott could hear him. "Listen, you lily-livered son of a bitch, you give me orders one more time and I'll pistol-whip you down to corporal." Starbuck was still smiling as he stepped a pace backward. "Don't you agree that's the best way to proceed, Major?"

Medlicott was not certain at first that he had heard right and just blinked at Starbuck. Then he took a backward pace and flicked the whip toward the captured boy. "He stole my watch," Medlicott said. "The little black bastard lifted it out of my pocket when I laid my coat down. It was a present from my wife, too," he added indignantly, "from Edna!" Starbuck looked at the boy. "Give the Major his watch." "Don't have it."

Starbuck sighed and stepped forward. The boy tried to twist aside, but Starbuck was too quick for him. He grabbed a handful of long dirty hair and held the squirming boy still. "Search him, Coffman," he said.

Lieutenant Coffman nervously began searching the boy's pockets. At first he found nothing; then it became apparent that the pants pockets had been elongated into long, capacious, sausage-shaped sacks specially strengthened to hold and conceal plunder, and the men watched in amazement as the evidence of the boy's thefts was dragged into the light. Coffman produced two hunter watches, a gilt picture frame, a collapsible silver cup, a folding mirror, two razors, a brass match case, a carved pipe, a signet ring, an ivory-handled shaving brush, a comb, a pack of cards, and a handful of coins. The men stared in awe at the hoard. "Oh, my God," one of them said, "just lay me down," and a bellow of laughter swept through the crowd.

Coffman stepped away from the boy. "That's all, sir," he said.

"They're all my property!" the boy insisted, trying to retrieve one of the watches, and the ring of men laughed and cheered at his insolence. They had been baying for his blood just a minute before, but there was something irresistible about the young man's unrepentant face and impressive haul of thefts.

Medlicott retrieved his watch. "He's a goddamn thief. He should be whipped."

"But I thought we were all thieves today," Starbuck said, and he was about to kick the boy on his way when a stentorian voice shouted from outside the ring of Legionnaires.

"Hold on to that nigger!" the voice shouted, and the men slowly parted to make way for the big, bearded Captain who had been supervising the manacling of the recaptured slaves. "Another damn runaway," the man said, reaching for the boy.

"I'm a free man!" the boy insisted.

"And I'm Abraham Lincoln," the Captain said as he grabbed the boy's striped shirt. He cuffed the long black hair aside and displayed one of the boy's earlobes to Starbuck. "Took his earring out, didn't he? First thing a runaway does, take off the earring." Earrings denoted slave status. "So if you're free, lad," the Captain went on, "why don't you show us your papers?"

The boy plainly had no papers. For a second or two he looked defiant; then he was overwhelmed by despair and tried to twist out of the Captain's grip. The Captain slapped him hard around the head. "You'll be picking cotton now, lad."

"He belongs to me," Starbuck said suddenly. He had not intended to speak, and certainly he had never intended to claim ownership of the boy, but there was something appealing about the young man's spirit that reminded Starbuck of his own desperate attempts to remake himself in an image of his own devising, and he knew that if he did not speak up, then the boy would be hammered and burned into the chains and then sold down the river to the living hell of the cotton plantations.

The Captain gave Starbuck a long, hard look, then spat a viscous brown stream of tobacco juice. "Out my way, boy."

"You call me 'sir,'" Starbuck said, "or I'll have you arrested and charged for rank insubordination. Now, boy, get the hell out of my regiment."

The Captain laughed at Starbuck's presumption, then twitched the fugitive slave toward the forge. Starbuck kicked the man hard between the legs, then rammed a flat palm into the bearded face. The Captain let go of the escaped slave and staggered backward. He was in terrible pain, but he succeeded in keeping his footing and was just starting forward with his fists clenched when there was the unmistakable click of a gun being cocked. "You heard the Major," Truslow's voice said, "so git."

The Captain put a hand to his face to wipe blood away from his mustache. He looked askance at Starbuck, wondering if the youngster really was a major, then decided that anything might be true in wartime. He pointed a blood-smeared finger at the cowering boy. "He's a contraband. The law says he's got to be returned—"

"You heard the Captain," Starbuck said, "so git."

Starbuck waited till the man had gone, then turned and took hold of the boy's ear. "Come here, you son of a bitch," he said, dragging the boy away from the crowd and into the warehouse, where he threw the lad hard onto a pile of grain sacks. "Listen, you little bastard, I've just saved you from a whipping, and better still, I've just saved you from being sold down the river. So what's your name?"

The boy rubbed his ear. "You really a major?"

"No, I'm the goddamn archangel Gabriel. Who are you?"

"Whoever I want to be," the boy said defiantly. Starbuck guessed he was fourteen or fifteen, an urchin who had learned to live by his wits.

"So who do you want to be?" Starbuck asked.

The boy was surprised by the question, but he thought about it, then grinned and shrugged. "Lucifer," he said at last.

"You can't be Lucifer," Starbuck said, shocked, "that's the devil's name!"

"Only name I'm giving you, master," the boy insisted.

Starbuck guessed that was true, so he settled for the satanic name. "So listen to me, Lucifer, my name's Major Starbuck, and I need a servant real bad and you just got the job. Are you hearing me?"

"Yes, sir." There was something cheeky and mocking in the response.

"And I need a comb, a toothbrush, field glasses, a razor that'll hold an edge, and something to eat other than hardtack and shoe leather. Are you hearing me?"

"I got ears, master! See?" Lucifer insolently plucked back his long ringlets. "One on each side, see?"

"So you go and get those things, Lucifer," Starbuck said. "I don't care how, and you be back here within the hour. Can you cook?"

The boy pretended to think about the question, drawing out his silence just beyond the edge of rudeness. "Sure, I can cook."

"Good. So get whatever you need for cooking utensils." Starbuck stood aside. "And bring me as many cigars as you can carry."

The boy sauntered into the sunlit doorway, where he stopped, plucked his disarrayed clothing into shape, then turned to look at Starbuck. "Suppose I don't come back?" "Just make sure you aren't sent down the river, Lucifer." The boy stared at Starbuck, then nodded at the wisdom of that advice. "Are you making me into a soldier?" he asked.

"I'm making you my cook."

The boy grinned. "How much are you paying me, Major?" "I just saved your worthless life and that's all the wages you're getting from me."

"You mean I'm your slave?" The boy sounded disgusted. "I mean you're a goddamn servant to the best goddamn officer in this goddamn army, so get the goddamn out of here and stop wasting my goddamn time before I goddamn kick you out."

The boy grinned. "Do I get a goddamn gun?" "You don't need a gun," Starbuck said. "In case I have to protect myself from the Yankees who want to make me into a free man," Lucifer said, then laughed. "Can't be a soldier without a gun."

"You ain't a soldier," Starbuck said. "You're a cook." "You said I can be whatever I want to be," the boy said, "remember?" Then he ran off.

"That's one nigger you won't see again," Truslow said from just outside the door.

"I don't really want to see him again." "Then you shouldn't have risked a fight for him," Truslow said. "That Captain would have murdered you." "So thank you," Starbuck said.

"I didn't run him off to save your good looks," Truslow said sarcastically, "but because it don't do the boys no good to see their Major having the shit thumped out of him. You want a pickled oyster?" He held out a jar of the delicacies; then, as Starbuck helped himself, Truslow turned and watched as a disconsolate herd of blue-coated prisoners limped past. The men were smartly uniformed but looked utterly whipped. Some of their heads showed livid saber slashes, wounds that had cut so deep that the blood had soaked their tunics down to their waists. The Northerners limped past, going to their long imprisonment, and Truslow grinned. "Just ain't their day, is it?" he said. "Just ain't their goddamn day."

Colonel Patrick Lassan of His French Majesty's Imperial Guard, who was officially a foreign military observer attached to the rebel army but who preferred to do his observing from the front ranks of the rebel cavalry, took a handful of his horse's mane and slowly drew his long straight sword through the coarse hair to scrub the blade clean of blood. He needed to clean the steel three times before it was fit to slide back into the scabbard; then, lighting a cigar, he trotted slowly back along the path of the cavalry charge.

A brigade of New Jersey troops had come from the defenses of Washington to evict what they believed was a band of rebel cavalry raiders from the depot at Manassas Junction. Only instead of encountering a handful of ragged cavalrymen, they had marched straight into the depot's old defensive earthworks manned by Stonewall Jackson's veteran infantry and artillery. Whipped by rifle fire and flayed by cannons, the New Jerseymen had retreated. It was then that Jackson had unleashed the cavalry, who had turned their retreat into a rout.

Dazed Northerners still reeled blindly about the field where the horsemen had charged. The Northerners were mostly wounded in the head or shoulders, the bloody wounds of men caught in the open by cavalrymen carrying sabers. Their comrades were either lying dead where the volleys of the entrenched defenders had ambushed them, or else were struggling to safety across the rain-swollen Bull Run, where, a year before, so many of their countrymen had drowned in the defeat of the first invasion of the Confederate States of America.

Lassan watched the rebels round up the living and loot the dead. The Confederates were joking about the ease of their victory, claiming it was further proof that a half-dozen Northerners were no match for a single Southerner, but Lassan was both more experienced and more sanguine and knew that the attack of the New Jersey brigade had been a blunder by an inexperienced general. The New Jersey officers had been so new to war that they had attacked with drawn swords, oblivious that they were thus making themselves targets for Southern marksmen. The Northern officers had led their men to horror, but Lassan knew that this slaughter of the innocents was an aberration and that soon the real fighting would begin. The North had been surprised by Jackson's march, but it would not be long before the Yankee veterans arrived to snap at the bait that hung so temptingly at Manassas Junction. For the North now had Stonewall Jackson outnumbered, they had him isolated, and, so they must surely believe, they had him doomed.