Battle Flag

***

AT MANASSAS, ON FRIDAY AUGUST 29, 1862, the first light showed a few moments after half past four. It was a gray wolfish light, at first little more than a cold thinning of the eastern darkness, yet it was sufficient to rouse Jackson's army. The men rolled their blankets and, for the first time since they had left the burning depot, were allowed to light fires. "The sons of bitches know we're here now, so we don't have to hide," Starbuck told his men, then sighed with content as he smelt the wondrous aroma of real coffee being brewed on dozens of fires.

At a quarter past five, a mug of the coffee clasped in his hands, he watched the scenery take shape across the turnpike. There were troops now where there had been none the night before. The brown smear of smoke that still rose from the depot had drawn an army to Manassas, and Starbuck could see lines of bivouacked infantry, parks of guns, and rows of tethered cavalry horses. The enemy, like his own men, were brewing coffee or shaving, while curious Yankee officers trained their field glasses and telescopes toward the silent western woods where the mingling plumes of smoke at last revealed the true extent of Jackson's position.

"We'll fight here, you reckon?" Captain Ethan Davies asked Starbuck. Davies was cleaning his spectacle lenses on the skirt of his coat. "It ain't a bad place to defend," Davies added, hooking the spectacles back onto his ears. The land fell away from the woods toward the turnpike, and Starbuck, like Davies, reckoned it was not a bad place to stand and fight, because the Yankees would have to attack uphill while the rebels would have the concealing woods at their back.

Yet, as the sun rose, Jackson abandoned the position and ordered his army to retreat westward. They did not go far, just a half-mile across unfilled fields into another ragged stretch of blackjack oaks, maples, and birch trees. This new wood was interrupted by small patches of rough meadowland and cut by two streams and a railbed that had been graded but never finished with ties and rails. The railbed had been intended to carry a line that would bypass Manassas Junction and so keep the trains of the Manassas Gap Railroad from paying the exorbitant fees required to use the rails of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, but the investors had run out of cash and abandoned the work, leaving only a smooth, wide, grassy roadway that ran through deep cuttings and along high embankments as it curved, always level, through the undulating woods. It was on the railbed that Jackson stopped with his twenty-four thousand men.

Colonel Swynyard's brigade would defend a stretch of the unfinished railroad that ran through a deep cutting. The eastward-facing bank of the cutting provided a firestep for riflemen, who could, if overwhelmed, retreat across the wide entrenchment into the woods on the western side. A hundred paces behind the cutting the ground rose steeply, though to the right of Swynyard's line, where the Faulconer Legion was posted, that hill faded away so that Starbuck's right-hand companies had no natural barrier behind them, only a flat stretch of young woodland and dense shrub. That change in topography also meant that the cutting became shallow as the railbed rose toward an embankment, while the existence of a deep spoil pit behind the line only made the defense line even more confusing. The spoil pit, only half filled, was where the railroad men had dumped the dirt and rocks they had not needed to build up their embankments.

The spoil pit marked the dividing line between Swynyard's brigade and their neighbors to the south, and Starbuck, once his men were in position, walked to meet those neighbors, a regiment from North Carolina. Their Colonel was a very tall, very thin, very fair-haired man in his early middle age with an elaborately drooping mustache, amused eyes, and a weather-beaten face. He had very long and studiedly old-fashioned hair that flowed past the faded blue collar of his gray frock coat. "Colonel Elijah Hudson," he introduced himself to Starbuck, "of Stanly County, and uncommon proud of it."

"Major Starbuck, of Boston, Massachusetts." Colonel Hudson pushed back a lock of his curled hair to uncover one ear. "I do believe my hearing has been quite obliterated by the artillery, Major, for I could swear you said Boston."

"So I did, Colonel, so I did, but my boys are all Virginians."

"The good Lord alone knows why you came here from Massachusetts, Major, but I sure am glad to make your acquaintance. Your boys up to hum, are they?"

"I reckon."

"Mine are rogues, each and every one of them. Not a man of them's worth a wooden nickel, but Lord above, how I do love the wretches. Ain't that so, boys?" Colonel Hudson had spoken loud enough for his nearest men to hear, and those men grinned broadly at his words. "And this here Major," Hudson went on to introduce Starbuck to his men, "is a poor lost Northerner fighting for us miserable rebels, but you all be nice to him, boys, because if his lads give way then we'll all be so many dead ducks waiting for John Pope to pluck us. And I don't have a fancy to be plucked by a cleric this day."

Starbuck led Hudson past the spoil pit to the Legion and introduced him to Major Medlicott, explaining that Medlicott not only commanded the company immediately adjacent to the North Carolinians but was also responsible for the whole right wing of the Legion. "Sure pleased to meet you, Major," Hudson said, putting out a hand. "My name's Elijah Hudson and I'm from Stanly County, the best county in all the Carolinas even though my dear wife does come from Catawba County, God bless her, and how are you?"

Medlicott seemed disconcerted by the tall man's friendliness but managed to make a civil response.

"We've got ourselves a killing patch," Hudson said, gesturing across the rail cutting to where the ground ran bare to the closest stretch of woods. It was a killing patch because any Yankees attacking out of the woods would be forced to cross those fifty paces of open land under constant fire. "I can't say it was ever my burning ambition to kill Yankees," Hudson said, "but if the dear good Lord above wants me to do it, then he sure does make it easy in a place like this. Mind you, if the Northern gentlemen do manage to get past the railbed, then we're all going to be in a heap of trouble. If that happens we might as well all pack it in and go back to our jobs. What is your job, Major?" he inquired of Starbuck.

"Soldiering, I guess. I was a student before the war."

"I'm a miller," Medlicott answered to a similar inquiry.

"And what better job could a man have," Hudson asked, "than to grind the Lord's corn into our daily bread? That sure is a privilege, Major, a genuine privilege, and I'm proud to know you for it."

"And your profession, sir?" Starbuck asked the tall Hudson.

"Can't rightly say I've got any profession, Starbuck, other than a love of God and Stanly County. I guess you could say I do a little of everything and a fair heap of nothing, but if I was pushed to the scratch I'd have to confess to being a farmer. Just one of America's toil-laden farmers, but proud as heck of it." Hudson smiled broadly, then offered his hand again to both men. "I guess I should go and make sure my rogues aren't running away out of sheer boredom. I count it a real privilege to fight beside you gentlemen and I wish you much happiness of the day." With a wave of his hand the lanky Hudson strode away.

"A nice fellow," Starbuck said.

"Grasping folk, North Carolinians," Medlicott said dourly. "I never did trust a North Carolinian."

"Well, he's trusting you," Starbuck said tartly, "because if we give way here then he'll be outflanked." He stared at Medlicott's riflemen, who were making themselves comfortable in the shallow stretch of the railbed cutting, then turned to look at the remains of the construction crew's spoil pit, which was now an overgrown hollow stretching for thirty yards behind the makeshift entrenchment. The hollow's stony, overgrown bed could serve as a hidden path into the rear of the rebel defenses. "I guess we ought to barricade the pit," Starbuck said.

"I don't need you to teach me my business," Medlicott answered.

Starbuck's temper whiplashed uncontrollably. "Listen, you son of a damned bitch," he said, "I ain't losing this damned battle because you don't like me. If the Yankees use that pit to get behind my line I'm going to use your damned skull for regimental target practice. You understanding me?" Medlicott, unable to compete with the intensity of Starbuck's anger, backed away two paces. "I know how to fight," he said uneasily.

Starbuck resisted the temptation to remind Medlicott of his cowardice at Cedar Mountain. "Then make sure you do fight," he said instead, "and to help you, put an abatis across the pit." An abatis was a barrier of branches that would entangle an attacker and offer a breastwork to a defender. Starbuck saw the hurt in the miller's face and regretted the fierceness of his tone. "I know you don't like me, Medlicott," he said, trying to make amends, "but our quarrel ain't with each other, it's with the Yankees."

"And you're a Yankee," the miller said sullenly.

Starbuck resisted the impulse to tongue-lash the wretched man a second time. "Get your fellows to build the abatis"—he forced himself to speak calmly—"and I'll be back soon to look at it."

"Don't trust me, is that it?"

"I hear you write a good letter," Starbuck said, "but I just don't know how good an abatis you can build." With that parting shot he walked away, blowing the frustration from his lungs in a plume of cigar smoke. He wondered if he should have reversed the Legion's usual order of battle by putting Truslow's men on the right and Medlicott's on the left, but such an act would have been construed as a deep insult to the right-flank companies, and Starbuck wanted to demonstrate to the men of those companies, if not to their officers, how he trusted them. He walked on to the northern end of his line, where Truslow's company was entrenched in the deepest section of the railbed's cutting. On their left was one of the Brigade's small Florida battalions. Truslow had paced the open land in front of the cutting to make certain his men knew the exact range of the woods.

"It's seventy-five yards from here to the timberline," Truslow told Starbuck, "and even a blind son of a bitch can hit a Yankee at seventy-five yards. The bullet will hardly have started to drop." He raised his voice so that the nearest Floridans could hear him. "Aim straight at the bastards' hearts and at worse you'll puncture their bellies. This is infant-school killing, not the hard stuff." The hard stuff was open-field fighting, where a bullet's long-range trajectory was so pronounced that a shot properly sighted at a man standing three hundred yards away would sail high over the cap of a soldier a hundred paces nearer. Starbuck had seen a full regimental volley fired at a line of skirmishers without a single bullet finding its mark.

There was a constant coming and going of staff officers probing the woods beyond the killing patch to watch for the Yankee advance. Colonel Swynyard made a similar reconnaissance and returned to give Starbuck what news he could. "They ain't advancing yet," he said.

"You think they'll come?"

"If they do what they're supposed to do, yes." He confirmed that the previous evening's action on the turnpike had indeed been designed to draw the Yankees to the attack. "I guess our job is to hold them here while Lee brings up the rest of the army."

Swynyard's mention of Lee was the first mention Starbuck had heard of the army's commander since they had arrived in Manassas. "Where is Lee?" he asked.

"Just the other side of Thoroughfare Gap," Swynyard said.

"He's that close?" Starbuck was surprised.

"I guess that's where he always intended to be," Swynyard said with undisguised admiration. "He sent us on ahead to draw the Yankees away from the river, and now he's following on behind, which means that if we can just hold the Yankees all morning, then Lee should hog-tie the lot of them this afternoon. If the good Lord wills it, that is," the Colonel added piously. The tic in his right cheek, which had slowly subsided after his abandonment of liquor, had mysteriously returned to full force. For a second Starbuck wondered if Swynyard had been at the bottle, then realized the tic must be a symptom of nervousness; this was the Colonel's first battle as a brigade commander, and he desperately wanted it to be a success. "How are your boys?" Swynyard asked.

"Good enough," Starbuck said, wondering what symptoms of nervousness he was displaying. Shortness of temper, maybe?

Swynyard turned and pointed to the hill behind the Legion's line. "I've got Haxall's Arkansas boys up there. If things get hard I'll send them down to help, but once they've gone we don't have any reserves."

"Artillery?" Starbuck asked.

"None that I've seen," Swynyard said. "None at all, I guess, but if Lee gets here fast then maybe we won't need none."

The Colonel climbed back to his command post. The sun rose higher, promising to bring another stifling day. Off to the south, muffled by distance, rifle shots sounded, but it was hard to tell whether they were being fired in anger or were merely the sound of men trying to provoke distant pickets. Some of Starbuck's men slept as they waited. A few pinned paper labels to their jackets to identify their bodies in case they died, others wrote letters or read or played cards. In the spoil pit the abatis was now breast high. "Tall enough for you?" Medlicott asked Starbuck.

"Is it tall enough for you?" Starbuck retorted. "It's your life it might save, not mine."

"If they attack at all," Medlicott said in a tone of voice suggesting that Starbuck's expectation of battle was merely alarmist.

By late morning Starbuck was himself wondering if the Northern army would ever attack.

Maybe the Northerners had detected Lee's approach and slipped away to fight another day, for this day had become somnolent, its peace broken by nothing more threatening than an occasional and distant rifle shot. Then, just as Starbuck had convinced himself that he was safe from battle this day, the woods to the left erupted with furious rifle fire. Startled men woke and pushed their rifles over the cutting's crude parapet. All along the line hammers clicked as men cocked their guns, but no Yankees appeared in the killing patch, only a frightened deer that ducked in and out of the sunlight before any man could squeeze off a shot.

Then a staff officer from the brigade to the north rode up the line, shouting for men to advance into the woods.

"To do what?" Starbuck shouted back.

The staff officer was excited and sweating, a drawn sword in his hand. "Yankees are over there. You can hit them in the flank."

"Do it, Starbuck!" Colonel Swynyard had arrived just in time to hear the officer. "Go for them!"

Starbuck sent Coffman to tell Colonel Hudson what was happening. He wanted to keep the North Carolinian well informed, just as Hudson had promised to keep Starbuck apprised of any threats on his southern flank. Then Star-buck scrambled up the cutting's face. "Legion!"

The men climbed from the cutting and formed in two ranks. There were no battle flags to be raised in the Legion's center, where Starbuck took his place. "Forward!" he shouted. The fighting was crackling and spitting in the woods, punctuated by rebel yells. It was hard to tell just what had provoked the fight, but plainly some rebel troops had crossed the railbed to intercept some Yankees among the trees, where Starbuck now led the Legion. He went fast, knowing that his careful battle line would be shredded by the oaks, but also knowing that any chance of finding an open Yankee flank was too compelling to be ignored.

The men panted behind him, crashing through undergrowth and splintering dry fallen branches as they ran. Starbuck was leading the Legion to his left, going slantwise across the rebels' front line. He could see gunsmoke sifting through the leaves ahead; then he glimpsed flashes of blue where a handful of Northern soldiers ran through the woods. He ran toward those enemy, but the blue coats disappeared in the trees. Somewhere a rifle fired, and Starbuck heard the bullet ripping through the leaves overhead, but he could not see the gunsmoke or tell whether it was a friend or foe who had fired. He slowed down to catch his breath. The Legion had long lost its cohesion as the companies broke apart in the woodland, so that now they were streaming through the trees like packs of hunters on a quick scent. A volley crashed to Starbuck's left, but no bullets came his way. A riderless horse foaming with sweat and with white eyes flashing plunged through the brush and galloped unchecked between two of Starbuck's companies. The wood suddenly seemed empty of enemy. Starbuck could hear shouted orders and sporadic rifle fire, but he could see no one, and he feared he had led his men far astray; then a sudden warning shout turned him to his left.

And there, suddenly, was an enemy. A huddle of Yankees were kneeling and firing, loading and aiming, but their targets were not the men of the Legion but other Southerners way off to the Legion's left, which suggested that Starbuck had indeed discovered the North's open flank. "Legion, halt! Aim!" He was giving his men precious little time. They skidded to a halt and raised their guns.

'Tire!"

The small group of Yankees were swept cruelly away. Over two hundred bullets had been fired at a score of men, and only one of them was able to stand when the volley was done, and that man was staggering and bleeding. "Charge!" Starbuck shouted. "And let me hear you scream!"

The Legion began to sound the rebel yell. Starbuck remembered that he had not ordered the men to fix bayonets, but it was too late to remedy the lack now. The Legion had been unleashed, and nothing could stop the ragged charge that screamed through the wood to take the enemy's open flank. The trees ahead were filled with fleeing Yankees. More rebels were coming from the left, and Starbuck shouted at his men to wheel right. "This way! This way!" The breath was pounding in his lungs. Somewhere a man screamed again and again, the sound terrible and pathetic until it was blissfully cut short by a rifle shot.

Starbuck leaped a dead man, stumbled on a fallen log, pushed through a laurel screen, then saw he had blundered into an open field covered with running men. "Halt!" he shouted. "Stop here! Reload!"

The Legion made a rough line at the wood's edge and fired at the horde of retreating Yankees. The men were too breathless and too excited to shoot well, but their rifle fire did serve to hasten the Yankees' panicked retreat. Another rebel regiment appeared to the Legion's left and pursued the enemy into the open meadow, but when Company H began to follow, Captain Truslow pulled them back just a second before a Northern battery unmasked itself in a stand of trees on the meadow's far side. The first cannon whipped a barrelload of canister through the exposed rebel pursuers. A second gun fired, this gun aiming shell at Starbuck's men. The missile cracked overhead and exploded in the trees just as a ragged Northern volley whistled over the pasture.

"Back!" Colonel Swynyard had advanced with the Legion. "Back to the railbed, lads! Well done!"

"Lieutenant Howes?" Starbuck shouted. "A party to collect guns and ammunition!"

"We've got some prisoners here, sir," Howes called back.

Starbuck had not been aware of any prisoners being taken, but sure enough there was a disconsolate group of a dozen men under a corporal's guard who had to be escorted back to the Brigade headquarters. Howe's men found a score of usable rifles and several hundred cartridges that they carried back through the woods.

"A nice beginning," Colonel Swynyard said to Starbuck when the Legion was back in its cutting.

"Easy pickings." Starbuck was dismissive. He could not recall a single bullet coming near him. He knew the Legion had not needed to be involved in the fight, but he was glad that his regiment had been given such a swift and simple victory. It was, as Swynyard had told him, a good beginning.

"But your man Meddlesome didn't move." Lucifer waited till Swynyard was gone before talking to Starbuck. "I watched him. He took his men into the woods and stopped there. You went on, he stayed back."

Starbuck grunted, not wanting to encourage Lucifer's indiscretion. "How old are you?" he asked the runaway slave instead.

Lucifer blinked with surprise at the unexpected question. "Seventeen," he said after a while. "Why?"

Starbuck suspected Lucifer had added at least a year to his age. "Because you're too young to die, that's why, so take yourself back to the wagon park."

"I ain't going to die. I'm charmed!" Lucifer said.

"Charmed?" Starbuck asked. "How?" He was remembering the crushed bird bones.

"Just charmed," Lucifer said. "Like I never got caught as a thief. Till your men trapped me, and there you were!" He grinned. "See? Charmed."

"But you were a thief," Starbuck said, not with disapproval, but simply to pin down the first piece of information about his past that Lucifer had so far offered.

"You think I'd wear those pants with long pockets otherwise? Mick gave them to me."

"Mick?"

"Mr. Micklewhite," Lucifer said. "He owns the big tavern at Manassas Junction and I worked for him."

"You were his slave?"

"I was his thief," Lucifer said. "But he wanted me to do other things. Because he said I'm young and good-looking." He laughed in self-mockery, but Starbuck detected an anxiety behind the words.

"What sort of things?" Starbuck asked.

"You need to be told? You don't know about appetite?"

"Appetite?"

But before Lucifer could answer there was a loud snap of a breaking twig in the woods beyond the killing patch. The Legion went still, fingers poised on triggers, but nothing more sounded from the trees. Off to the right the firing began again, but that far-off battle belonged to someone else. Starbuck looked for his servant again, but Lucifer had vanished, taking his past with him. Ahead of Starbuck the green woods were silent. Somewhere beyond the silence eighty thousand Yankees gathered, but here, for the moment, there was peace.

Starbuck had chosen not to put skirmishers into the woods. The killing patch between the railbed's cutting and the tree line was too wide, so that by the time his own skirmishers would have returned to the Legion's lines the pursuing Yankees would already have been halfway across the open space. The North Carolinians on the Legion's right, however, were faced by an ever-narrowing strip of open land and had taken the precaution of putting a skirmish line among the trees, and it was those men who alerted Starbuck to the day's second Yankee attack, an assault much better organized than the North's first motley advance.

The battle between the skirmishers did not take long. The Yankees were advancing in too much force, and the woods were no place for scattered men to fight against a horde. Hudson's skirmishers fired a single round each, then ran for their lives, yet that scattered volley was sufficient to warn the Legion that the attack was coming.

Starbuck was in the cutting with Company C, which was now commanded by the excitable, quick-tempered William Patterson, who was a stonemason and thus the unwilling butt of too many jokes about gravestones. Patterson had pretensions of gentility and had greeted his unexpected promotion by adorning himself with a red waist sash, a plumed hat, and a sword. He had discarded the sword and plumed hat for this day's fight, but the sash still marked him as an officer. "Ready, boys, ready!" he shouted, and his men licked dry lips and watched the trees anxiously. "They're coming, boys, they're coming!" Patterson called, yet still the green woods were empty, the trees dappled by sunlight alone and the humid air unsullied by powder smoke.

Then, suddenly, the Northerners were in sight. A mass of men ran soundlessly into view. Flags and bayonets were bright. For a second, a split heartbeat, Starbuck watched the rare sight of a whole army attacking straight into his face, then bellowed the order to open fire.

"Fire!" Patterson echoed the shout, and his company's front vanished in a cloud of powder smoke.

"Fire!" Moxey screamed at the company next door. Patterson's men were spitting bullets into rifles, shoving ramrods down barrels, and scrabbling for percussion caps in the upturned hats placed conveniently beside the firestep.

"Fire!" Company D's Captain Pine shouted.

"Fire!" Lieutenant Howes called from Company E. The Yankee attack was oblique, emerging from the trees first to the south, then to the north.

And suddenly, like a great tide bursting on a beach, the sound of the attack overwhelmed Starbuck. It was the sound of a great infantry charge: the noise of cheering, screaming, swearing men, and the noise of drums and bugles behind them, and the noise of his own men's bullets whacking into rifle stocks, and the noise of miniй bullets thumping into flesh, and the noise of the first wounded men screaming and gasping, and the noise of ramrods rattling metallic in rifles, and the whistling whip-quick noise of hollow-tailed miniй bullets, and the noise of thousands of heavy boots, and the noise of screaming orders, and the noise of men cursing their clumsiness as they fumbled to tear open cartridges.

It was an unending crescendo of noise, a tumult of battering sound waves that obliterated senses already swamped by powder smoke. All a man could do now was fight, and fighting meant pouring lead into the gunsmoke to drive away the pounding, cursing enemy. And the enemy still came forward, rank after rank of blue-coated men beneath their high striped banners. "Fire!" a Yankee shouted.

"Fire!" Truslow's voice answered from the Legion's left flank.

"They're firing high," Private Matthews exulted just five paces from Starbuck, then Matthews was flicked backward by a bullet to the head that took away a saucer-sized piece of his skull and spattered his neighbor with blood and brains. Lieutenant Patterson stood transfixed as Matthews's body slid to a halt at his feet. The body twitched, blood pouring from the shattered cranium.

"Fire!" Starbuck shouted. He saw a boy pull the trigger; nothing happened, yet the boy started to ram another charge down a barrel probably stuffed with unfired charges. Starbuck picked up Matthews's blood-sticky rifle and ran to the boy. "Fire the damn thing before you load it!" he snapped, handing the frightened lad the new gun. Starbuck took the boy's rifle and tossed it back out of the cutting. He fired his own rifle into the gray mist of smoke, then ran along the cutting past Moxey's company to where Medlicott guarded the vulnerable right flank. The miller was fighting well enough, firing his revolver into the smoke that was now being fed by the volleys of both sides to create a single filthy-smelling leprous yellow cloudbank. The Yankee charge seemed to have stalled, though it had not been defeated. Instead the Northerners were holding their ground in the killing patch and trying to overwhelm the rebel line with volley fire.

"We're still here, Starbuck, still here!" The speaker was the genial Colonel Hudson, who had come to his own left flank on an errand not dissimilar to Starbuck's own. "Mr. Lincoln's Republican party is noisy today, is it not?" the Colonel said, gesturing toward the Yankees with a switch of hazel that was apparently his weapon of choice. A bullet slapped past Hudson's long hair. "Rotten shot," the Colonel lamented, "terrible shooting! They really should look to their musket training."

Then a second great cheer sounded from beyond the smoke, and there was a resurgence of that first terrible sound that had swollen to burst against the rebels' defenses. "Dear Lord," Hudson said, "I do believe a second line is coming. Hold hard, boys! Hold hard!" He strode back along his line.

"Oh, Christ, oh, Christ!" Major Medlicott was fumbling percussion caps onto his revolver. "Oh, Christ!" He raised the gun, only half primed, and shot blindly into the smoke. Beyond that smoke the Yankee fire had slackened as the first wave of attackers made way for the second. The rebels fired on into the gloom, seeing their targets only as dark shadows in the luminous smoke cloud; then a screaming mass of men with fixed bayonets materialized in that fogbank.

"Back!" Medlicott shouted, and his men scrambled away from the shallow cutting.

"Stay and fight, damn it!" Starbuck bellowed, but the panic was infectious, and the company streamed past him. For a second Starbuck was alone in the wide ditch; then he saw the open mouths of Yankee attackers not ten paces away, and he ran for his life. He expected a bullet in the back at any second as he scrambled up the western bank and followed Medlicott's company into the tangle of saplings and bushes.

The Yankees scented victory. They cheered as they jumped down into the cutting and as they scrambled up its further bank. Their flags streamed forward. A gap had opened between the Legion and Hudson's North Carolinians, and the Northern infantry poured into the gap, where they discovered the unguarded spoil pit. Like a wave of water released by a broken dam they swarmed into the hollow, only to surge up against the abatis. They recoiled for a second as the tangle of branches checked their headlong charge; then they flowed around the barrier's flanks to swarm up to the spoil pit's edge.

"Fire!" Colonel Swynyard had brought Haxall's Arkansas battalion down the hill to meet the Yankee charge where it tried to climb out of the spoil pit. Rifles slashed fire into the pit. The rebels could not miss, for the Yankees were crammed tighter than rats in a terrier pit. "Fire!" Major Haxall called, and a second volley whipped down and the Yankee mass seemed to quiver like a great wounded beast.

"Get your men formed, and fight!" Swynyard shouted angrily at Starbuck. "Goddamn it, fight!"

"Damn!" Starbuck was lost, confused. The attackers in the pit were being slaughtered, but more Yankees had crossed the ditch and were charging through the scrub, where handfuls of dogged rebels resisted them. Starbuck blundered through the trees, seeking men, any men, finding nothing but chaos, and then he saw Peter Waggoner, the giant, Bible-thumping Sergeant from Company D. Sweet Jesus, Starbuck thought, but if Company D had been thrown out of the railbed, then the Legion must be unraveling all along its length. "Waggoner!"

"Sir?"

"Where's your company?"

"Here, sir! Here!" And there, crouching frightened behind the big Sergeant, was most of Company D. Captain Pine was pushing men into line, screaming at them to stand and fight.

"Fix bayonets," Starbuck called, "and follow me! And scream! For God's sake, scream!"

The ululating, blood-chilling sound of the rebel yell whipsawed in the air as the company followed Starbuck back toward the railbed. Goddamn it, but he would not be beaten! A Yankee appeared in front of Starbuck, and he fired his revolver straight into the man's face, which seemed to vanish in a spray of red as the shock of the gun's recoil jarred up to Starbuck's shoulder. He half slipped in a slick of blood, then fired into a mass of blue uniforms in front. "Charge!" he screamed. "Charge!" And Waggoner's men came with him, screaming like devils released to mischief, and the disordered Yankees went backward. The desperate charge through the brush had collected more groups of scattered Legionnaires, so that Starbuck was now leading almost a third of his regiment in a blood-crazed, desperate, vicious counterattack. The Northerners had been on the brink of victory but were suddenly confused by this unexpected opposition. The Yankees retreated.

Starbuck leaped back into the railbed. A Northerner slipped on the far bank, turned, and swung his rifle. Starbuck fired at the man, heard him scream, then jumped over the falling body to sprawl and trip at the top of the embankment. A rifle shot cracked over his head, then a wave of his own men went past him and a giant hand plucked him onto his feet. "Come on, sir!" It was Sergeant Peter Waggoner. A cannon fired somewhere, adding its new noise to the din of battle. Behind Starbuck, at the rim of the spoil pit, the rifle volleys still flailed down to turn the hollow into a charnel house. The Yankees were retreating, stunned by the violence of the rebel backlash. Starbuck ran past the heap of bodies killed in the rifle duel that had preceded the second Yankee surge forward. He knew he had lost command of his men and that now they were fighting from instinct and without proper guidance, and so he sprinted forward to try and get ahead of them and somehow bring them under control.

The Yankees had brought a small cannon forward to the edge of the trees. The gun was scarcely four feet high and had a short, wide-muzzled barrel. They had managed to fire one shot with the gun, and now its four-man crew was desperately trying to haul the weapon back through the trees to save it from being captured by the screaming, battle-maddened gray wave. In their haste the gunners rammed one of the gun-wheels into a tree and thus stalled their retreat. "The gun!" Starbuck shouted. "The gun!" If he could concentrate his men at the gun, then he had a chance of regaining control of the Legion. "Go for the gun!" he shouted and ran toward the cannon himself. Something hit him hard on the left thigh, spinning him and almost knocking him down. He limped for a pace, waiting for the delayed agony to sear through his body. He took a breath ready to scream and almost sobbed instead as he felt wetness spill down his leg, then realized the enemy bullet had merely smashed his canteen. It was not blood, but water. His hip was bruised, but he was unwounded, and his self-pitying scream turned into a defiant yelp of relief. All around him the rebel yell filled the air. One of the Yankee gunners, knowing that the trapped weapon was lost, leaned across a wheel to tug the lanyard of the cannon's primer, and Starbuck, realizing with horror that the cannon was still loaded and that a storm of canister was about to be unleashed on his men, fired the last shots of his revolver. He saw a slash of bright metal show on the cannon's barrel as a round ricocheted off the bronze; then his last bullet whipped the enemy gunner backward onto the ground.

"Legion!" Starbuck screamed. "To me!" He was among the trees now, just yards from the gun. The Yankees had fled into the broken, smoking wood, where the trunks were bitten by rifle fire. "Legion! Legion! Legion!" Starbuck shouted. He reached the cannon and put a proprietorial hand on its bullet-flecked barrel. "Legion! Form line! Form line! Fire! Legion! Legion!" He was screaming like a mad thing, as though he could impose his will on the excited men by sheer force of mind and voice. "Form!" He shouted the word desperately.

And men at last heard him and at last obeyed him. Companies were mixed together, officers were missing, sergeants and corporals were dead, but the maddened charge somehow shook itself into a crude firing line that slammed a volley into the wood. The volley was matched by one from the enemy. The Yankees, retreating into the trees, had turned and formed their own battle line. One of Starbuck's men screamed as he was hit in the leg, another staggered back into the smoky sunlight with blood seeping between fingers that were clutched to his belly. A bullet smacked hollowly into one of the captured cannon's ammunition chests. Somewhere a man gasped the name Jesus over and over.

God Almighty, Starbuck thought, but somehow they had survived. He felt sick to his stomach. He felt ashamed, and his hands were shaking as he reloaded his revolver. He had failed. He had felt the Legion disintegrate around him like a crumbling dam, and there had been nothing he could do. There were tears on his face, tears of shame at having failed. He pressed the percussion caps onto the revolver's cones and fired it into the shadowed smoke beneath the trees.

"Sir!" Captain Pine of D Company, his lips blackened by powder and his eyes red from the smoke, appeared beside him. "Do we take the gun, sir?" He gestured at the captured cannon.

"Yes!" Starbuck said, then forced himself to calm down, to think. "Keep firing!" he shouted at the Legion's ragged line; then he looked more carefully at the gun. A dead horse lay nearby, just one horse, and there was no limber, but only wooden chests of ammunition, and Starbuck remembered Swynyard telling him about the mountain howitzers of the old U.S. Army, and he realized that this twelve-pounder cannon was one of those old rough-country guns that were transported on the backs of single packhorses. This captured howitzer was not a heavy gun, but even so it would need a half-dozen men to drag it through the trees and back to the railbed, and Starbuck knew that the absence of even a half-dozen men would weaken his line enough to let the Yankees surge back. Maybe, he thought, he should just spike the gun and abandon it; then he saw a mass of blue uniforms behind his fragile line and panic soared in him.

He was about to scream at his men to turn and drive this new enemy away, then realized that the blue coats belonged to prisoners. They were Yankees who had survived the horror in the spoil pit and who had now climbed out into the open ground. "Get some of those Yankees," Starbuck said to Pine, "and have them drag the gun back. And be careful, it's loaded!"

"Use prisoners, sir?" Pine asked, apparently shocked at the idea.

"Do it!" Starbuck turned back to the east to see that his men were doggedly firing and loading, firing and loading. Most were sheltering behind trees, just as the Yankees were, which meant that the firefight was settling into a stalemate, but soon the Legion must withdraw to its railbed trench, and Starbuck was determined that the retreat should be made in good order. He would not lose control as he had before.

Lieutenant Pine was arguing with a captured Yankee officer. Starbuck stooped to the gun's trail and picked up a length of one-inch rope with iron prolonge hooks spliced into its ends. He threw the rope to Pine. "Shoot the bastard if he won't do as he's told!" he shouted.

Pine finally organized a morose work party of a dozen prisoners, who were given the rope to hold. Pine himself attached one of the hooks to the lunette, the ring at the tip of the gun's trail, then shouted at his unwilling team to haul away. The trail swung around, and the gun eased itself away from the tree, so that its short, black-mouthed muzzle was turned to face back toward its erstwhile owners. "Stop!" Starbuck shouted.

The astonished prisoners dropped the rope. "Clear me! Clear me!" Starbuck bellowed at those of his men who were firing at the enemy from in front of the cannon. "Clear me!" Two men looked around, saw the gun facing them, and ran hastily to one side. Starbuck, when he was sure the field of fire was clear of his own men, leaned across the wheel and grasped the primer's lanyard. He waited a handful of seconds until he could see some Northerners stepping from behind trees to aim their rifles, then pulled the lanyard.

The gun cracked like the shattering hammer blow of doom. Smoke jetted thirty yards forward, while the gun itself recoiled clear out of the trees and almost ran down its blue-coated haulers. The tin canister had split apart at the muzzle to scatter its balls like giant buckshot. Starbuck's ears were ringing from the explosion. "Take it away! Hurry!" Starbuck shouted at the scared Yankee prisoners. "Whip them if they won't work," Starbuck shouted at Pine. "We slavers know how to whip!" The startled Yankee prisoners began to haul as though their lives depended on it, and the smoking gun trundled away across the rough ground so fast that it bounced two feet in the air when its wheels struck a sprawling corpse. In the trees the cannon smoke cleared to reveal a patch of woodland ripped and scarred by canister. "Keep firing!" Starbuck shouted at his men; then, as Pine's team dragged the gun back across the shallowest part of the cutting and so up to the sparse woodland beyond, Starbuck ran to his right to determine where his men's line ended.

He found Lieutenant Patterson. "Where's Medlicott?" Starbuck shouted over the rifle fire. "Haven't seen him, sir."

"Have your men load, then go back to the railbed and be ready to fire when the rest of us come back!" Starbuck had to shout over the splintering rifle fire. Patterson nodded. He was wild-eyed and frenetic, firing a revolver again and again at the Yankees. Even when the revolver's hammer began clicking on exploded percussion caps, Patterson kept cocking and firing, cocking and firing. Starbuck slapped the unprimed gun down and made the Lieutenant repeat the orders he had been given. "Do it now!" Starbuck ordered, then ran northward to find Lieutenant Howes, Sergeant Tyndale, and Captain Leighton. He told them to pull their men back to the railbed. "One last volley to keep the Yankees busy," he ordered, "then run like hell, understand?" Starbuck was beginning to understand the Legion's ragged dispositions now. Medlicott and Moxey were missing, the four center companies were either in the trees or gone back with Lieutenant Patterson, while presumably Truslow and Davies had never moved from the railbed.

"Fire!" Captain Leighton shouted, and the rifle flames speared bright in the trees.

"Back!" Starbuck shouted. "Back!"

They ran back, leaping the tideline of blue-coated bodies and then jumping over their own dead into the railbed. The Northerners were slow to realize that the rebels were gone, and it was a long moment before their first skirmishers appeared at the tree line. "Had enough, Johnny?" one Northerner shouted.

"Go back, Billy, before we send you home in a box!" a rebel called back.

"Oh, my God," another man said, panting from the exertions of the last few minutes, "just lay me down."

Starbuck ran down the railbed until he came to Captain Davies's company, which, as he had suspected, had never moved from its position. Truslow had seen to that, barricading the railbed with a fallen tree so that the threatening disaster to the South had been given no chance of spreading as far as his company. There were dead Yankees all along the front of Truslow and Davies's men, but none of the enemy had come closer than fifteen yards from the parapet. "So what were you doing up there?" Truslow asked calmly.

"Not very well," Starbuck confessed.

"The Legion's still in place," Truslow said in a voice so grim that it was a moment or two before Starbuck realized the words were probably meant as a compliment.

"God knows if we can take another attack," he said.

"Ain't none of God's business," Truslow said, "but if the bastards do come again, then we'll just have to drive them off again. Well done!" This rare enthusiastic praise was not directed at Starbuck but at Sergeant Bailey, who had brought replacement ammunition to the railbed. Two other men were tending a fire so that Truslow's company would have boiling water to scour the powder deposits from their rifles.

Starbuck walked back along his defense line. The Yankees had settled at the tree line, from where they were directing a constant and harassing rifle fire at the railbed. Starbuck's men kept their heads down, sometimes raising themselves to fire a shot or sometimes just lifting a rifle over the makeshift parapet and squeezing the trigger blindly. "Don't waste ammunition!" Starbuck snarled at one man who had thus fired without sighting first. "If you're going to shoot, aim, and if you're not, keep low."

There were bodies in the railbed. Some were the Legion's own dead, lying on their backs, mouths open and hands curled. Starbuck recognized a few men with sadness, some without any regret, and a handful with satisfaction. One or two of the rebel dead were strangers. He should have known them, but he had not had time to learn the names and faces of every new conscript. The Yankee dead had mostly been hoisted onto the parapet to help protect the rebel living, while the Legion's white-faced wounded lay breathing shallowly against the rear slope of the cutting.

Starbuck resisted the urge to crouch as the cutting became shallower. An officer was supposed to show his men an example of fearlessness, and Starbuck kept his pace steady even as his mind screamed and his pulse raced with fear. Bullets slapped the air around him for the few seconds that he was exposed to the Yankees; then he was able to jump down into the spoil pit, which was grotesque with enemy dead. The smell of blood was thick, and the first flies already swarming on the bloodied wounds. It was the spoil pit, Starbuck reckoned, that had saved the Legion. The hollow had drawn the attackers away from the rest of the line because of its promise of a safe, covered route into the rebel rear. But once in the pit the Northerners had been trapped, first by the abatis and then by the fire of Haxall's battalion, which Swynyard had brought down from the hill.

"We're thin on the ground, sir," Lieutenant Patterson greeted Starbuck.

"Thin?"

Patterson shrugged. "Half A and B companies are missing."

"Medlicott? Moxey?" Starbuck need not have asked. Both men were absent, and no one knew where they might be. Coffman was safe, crouching under the railbed's shallow parapet with a rifle he had taken from a dead man, and Captain Pine's mountain howitzer was also safe. It had been parked at the back crest of the spoil pit, where it was attracting Yankee bullets.

Patterson saw Starbuck glance at the gun. "We forgot to bring the ammunition, sir."

Starbuck swore. Nothing was going right this day, nothing, except, as Truslow had said, the Legion was still in place. Which meant the battle was not lost. And happily, except for the one hapless mountain howitzer, the Yankees had not deployed any artillery against the Legion. The woods were too thick to let the gunners of either side deploy their weapons, though just as that thought occurred to Starbuck, some shells began to explode. They were rebel shells, and they burst in the woods over the Yankees, who, astonished by the shrapnel, crept back from the tree line. The gunfire seemed to be coming from far to the south, but it stopped abruptly as a surge of cheering and rifle fire sounded further down Jackson's line. Starbuck, listening to the sound of battle, guessed he was hearing a Yankee attack like the one the Legion had just, though barely, survived. The gunners had shortened their range to enfilade the attackers, and the Yankees close to the Legion crept back to the tree line to begin their harassing fire again.

Haxall's men had returned to the hill, from where they were now sharpshooting across the railbed, while Hudson's North Carolinians were also back in place. The tall Colonel Hudson saw Starbuck and strode toward him. "A hot place, Starbuck!" He meant the railbed hard by the spoil pit.

"I'm sorry my fellows ran."

"My dear man, mine went as well! Scattered like barnyard fowls!" Hudson decently refrained from pointing out that his men had no choice but to run once Medlicott had exposed their flank. "Have you the time?" the Colonel now asked. "A Yankee shot my watch, see?" He showed Starbuck the torn pocket where the watch had been stored. "Bullet went straight through without touching me, but it rather mangled the watch. Pity. It belonged to my grandfather. It kept terrible time, but I was fond of it and hoped to pass it on to my son."

"You've got a son?" Starbuck asked, somehow surprised by the information.

"Three altogether, and a brace of daughters. Tom's my oldest boy. He's twenty-four now and serves as one of Lee's aides."

"Lee!" Starbuck was impressed. "The Lee?"

"Bobby himself. Nice fellow. Still, pity about the watch." The Colonel picked a piece of shattered watch glass from the remnants of his pocket.

"Coffman!" Starbuck shouted. "What time is it?"

Coffman had inherited an ancient timepiece from his father, and now he fished its bulbous case from an inner pocket and clicked open the lid. "It says thirty minutes after four, sir."

"It must have stopped this morning," Starbuck said. "It can't be that late."

"But look at the sun!" Hudson said, intimating that it truly was that late in the afternoon.

"Then where's Lee?" Starbuck asked. "I thought he was coming to relieve us."

"I find it best to plan military affairs on the twin principles that whatever I am told is certain will never occur, and that whatever is proclaimed impossible is disastrously imminent. There is no good news in war," Hudson pronounced grandly, "only less bad news. Dear, oh dear." The mild oath had been caused by a resurgence of enemy rifle fire from the tree line. "I do believe, my dear Starbuck, that the Republican party claims our attention again. Ah, well, to our toil, to our toil."

And the storm broke again.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck was trying to understand what was happening. Comprehension, he thought, was not much to ask. War was as rational an activity as any other human endeavor and must, he presumed, yield to analysis, yet whenever he inquired of a general officer what exactly was occurring in the western woods, he received a different answer.

The North was attacking, one general said, yet the general's own men were sprawling in the meadows playing cards and smoking pipes. "All in good time, all in good time," the General said when the preacher asked him why his men were not supporting the attack. One of the General's staff officers, a superior young man who made clear his disapproval of a civilian intruding on a battlefield, informed the Reverend Starbuck that Jackson was retreating, the Yankees were pursuing, and that the commotion in the woods was nothing but a noisy rear guard.

Major Galloway also tried to reassure the preacher. Galloway had been ordered to wait until the attacking infantry broke through Jackson's line, after which his men would join the Northern cavalry in their pursuit of the shattered enemy. The Reverend Starbuck waited on horseback for that promised breakthrough and tried to convince himself that the Major's explanation made sense. "Jackson's attempting to retreat southward, sir," Galloway told the preacher, "and our fellows have him pinned against the woods over there," but even Galloway was unhappy with that analysis. The Major, after all, had failed to find any evidence that Jackson had ever gone to Centreville, so it did not make sense that he would now be retreating from that town, which raised the mystery of what exactly the Southern general was doing. And that mystery was made even more worrying by Billy Blythe's repeated assertions that he had seen a second rebel army marching toward Manassas from the west. Galloway was unwilling to share his anxiety with the Reverend Doctor Starbuck, but the Major had the distinct impression that perhaps General Pope had utterly misunderstood what was truly happening.

Galloway's unhappiness was compounded by the acrid mood that prevailed within his small regiment. Blythe's return had stirred Adam Faulconer's anger, an anger that had come to a head the night before when the Virginian had accused Blythe of murdering civilians at McComb's Tavern. Blythe had denied the accusation. "We was fired on by soldiers," Blythe maintained.

"And the soldiers begged you to stop firing because there were women there!" Adam insisted.

"If a man had done that," Blythe said, "I would have ceased fire instantly. Instantly! Upon my word, Faulconer, but what kind of a man do you take me for?"

"A liar," Adam had said, and before Galloway could intervene, the challenge had been made.

But the duel had not yet been fought, and perhaps, Galloway dared hope, the duel would never be fought, to which end he now enlisted the Reverend Starbuck's aid. The preacher, happy to have a purpose while the infantry battle still raged, spoke first to Captain Blythe and afterward brought a report of the conversation back to Galloway. "Blythe admits there might have been women in the tavern," the Reverend Starbuck said, "and the thought distresses him greatly, but he plainly wasn't aware of them at the time and he promises me that he heard no calls for any cease-fire." The preacher paused for a moment to watch the smoke trails of artillery shells arching across the distant woods, then frowned at the Major. "What kind of women would be in a tavern anyway?"

Galloway hoped the question was rhetorical, but the preacher's expression suggested he wanted an answer. The Major cast around for a suitable evasion and found none. "Whores, sir," he finally said, coloring with embarrassment for having used such a word to a man of God.

"Precisely," the preacher said. "Women of no virtue. So why is Faulconer making this commotion?"

"Adam has a tender conscience, sir."

"He is also in your regiment, Major, by courtesy of my money," the preacher said sharply, conveniently overlooking that the money for Galloway's Horse had actually been subscribed by hundreds of humble, well-meaning folk throughout New England, "and I will not have the Lord's work hampered by a misplaced sympathy for fallen women. Captain Faulconer must learn that he cannot afford a tender conscience, not on my money!"

"You'll talk to him, sir?" Galloway asked.

"Directly," the preacher said and immediately beckoned Adam to one side. The two men rode far enough for their conversation to be private; then the preacher demanded to know exactly what evidence Adam had for his accusation of murder.

"The evidence of a newspaper, sir," Adam said, "and my own apprehension of Captain Blythe's character."

"It was a Southern newspaper." The Reverend Starbuck easily demolished the first part of Adam's evidence.

"So it was, sir."

"And your other evidence is merely founded upon your dislike of Captain Blythe's character? You think we can afford the luxuries of such self-indulgent judgments in wartime?"

"I have grounds for that dislike, sir."

"Grounds! Grounds!" The Reverend Starbuck spat the two words out. "We are at war, young man, we cannot indulge in petty squabbles!"

Adam stiffened. "It was Captain Blythe who issued the duel challenge, sir, not me."

"You called him a liar!" the Reverend Starbuck said.

"Yes, sir, I did."

The Reverend Starbuck shook his head sadly. "I have talked with Blythe. He assures me, on his word as a gentleman, that he had no idea any women were present in the tavern, and he still maintains there were none present, but he accepts he might be mistaken, and all he asks of you is your acceptance that he would never have continued the battle had he known that his actions were risking the lives of women. I believe him." The Reverend Starbuck paused, offering Adam a chance to utter agreement, but Adam remained obstinately silent. "For the love of God, man," the preacher protested, "do you really believe that a man of honor, an officer of the United States Army, a Christian, would persecute women?"

"No, sir, I don't believe that," Adam said pointedly.

It took a few seconds for the Reverend Starbuck to appreciate the debating point Adam had made, and the appreciation did not improve the preacher's temper. "I'll thank you not to be clever with me, young man. I have investigated this matter. I know the wickedness of mankind better than you, Faulconer. I have wrestled with iniquity all my life and my judgments are not based on Southern newspapers, but on hard experience tempered, I trust, with prayerful charity, and I am telling you now that Captain Blythe is no murderer and that his actions that night were chivalrous. It is unspeakable that a man could behave in the way you describe! Unthinkable! Manifestly impossible!"

Adam shook his head. "I could tell you of another occasion, sir," he said, and was about to tell the tale of the woman he had discovered in the barn with Blythe, but the preacher gave him no chance to tell the story.

"I will not listen to rumor!" the Reverend Starbuck insisted. "My God, I will not listen to rumor. We are engaged upon a crusade, Faulconer, a great crusade to forge God's chosen nation. We are purging that nation of sin, burning the iniquity from its heart with a fierce and righteous fire, and there is no room, no merit, no satisfaction, no justification for any man to put his personal whims ahead of that great cause. As our Lord and Savior Himself said, 'He that is not with Me is against Me,' and upon my soul, Faulconer, if you oppose Major Galloway in this matter then you will find that Christ and I are both become your enemies."

Adam began to feel a sympathy for his onetime friend, Nathaniel Starbuck. "I would have no one doubt my loyalty to the cause of the United States, sir," he said in feeble protest to the preacher.

"Then shake Blythe's hand and admit you were wrong," the Reverend Starbuck said.

"Me? That I was wrong?" Adam could not help asking the astonished question aloud.

"He admits you might be right, and that perhaps there were women there, so can you not do the same and admit that he would have behaved differently had he known?"

Adam's head was awhirl. Somehow, he was not sure how, he had been maneuvered into the wrong. He was also painfully aware that he was in the preacher's debt, and so, though it cut hard against a stubborn grain, he nodded his head. "If you insist, sir," he said unhappily.

"It's your conscience that should insist, but I am glad all the same. Come!" And the Reverend Starbuck thumped his horse's flanks to lead Adam across to where the grinning Billy Blythe waited. "Mr. Faulconer has something to say to you, Captain," the Reverend Starbuck announced.

Adam made his admission that he might have misjudged Captain Blythe, then apologized for that misjudgment. He hated himself for making the apology, but he nevertheless tried to make it sound heartfelt. He even held out his hand afterward.

Blythe shook the offered hand. "I guess we Southern gentlemen are just too hotheaded, ain't that right, Faulconer? So we'll say no more about it."

Adam felt demeaned and belittled. He put a brave face on the defeat, but it was still a defeat and it hurt. Major Galloway, though, was touchingly pleased by the apparent reconciliation. "We should be friends," Galloway said. "We have enemies enough without making them from our own side."

"Amen to that," Blythe said, "amen to that."

"Amen indeed," the Reverend Starbuck echoed, "and hallelujah."

Adam said nothing but just stared at the woods where the smoke rose from the guns.

While to the south, unseen by any Northern troops, regiment after regiment of rebel infantry was marching on a country road that led to the open flank of John Pope's army. Lee's reinforcements were arriving just as the Yankees' last great charge of the day was hurled against the railbed in the woods.

Above the Blue Ridge Mountains the sun sank slowly into a summer's evening. The Reverend Starbuck saw the imminence of nightfall and clenched his fists as he prayed that God would grant John Pope the same miracle that He had granted unto Joshua when He had made the sun stand still above Gibeon so that the armies of Israel would have the time to strike down the Amorites. The preacher prayed, bugles sounded in the woods, a loud cheer echoed among the trees, and the last great onslaught of the day charged on.