“Me?” Adam asked again, this time of his father.

“Yes, you, Adam.” Faulconer tossed his napkin onto the table. “And talking of uniforms, you’ll find one in your room. Put it on, then come to the study and we’ll fit you out with a saber. You too, Nate. Every officer should carry a blade.”

Adam paused and for a second or two Starbuck feared that this was the moment when his friend would make his pacifist stand. Starbuck tensed for the confrontation, but then, with a decisive nod that suggested he had made his choice only after a great effort of will, Adam pushed back his chair. “To work,” he said quietly, almost to himself, “to work.”

The work proved to be a glorious early summer of drumbeats and drill, of exercises across pastureland and of comradeship in tented encampments. They were hot days of laughter, weariness, sore muscles, tanned skin, high hopes and powder-stained faces. The Legion practiced musketry until the men’s shoulders were bruised from the impact of the guns and their faces smeared black by the explosion of the percussion caps and their lips powder stained from biting open the paper-wrapped cartridges. They learned to fix bayonets, to form a firing line and to make a square to fend off cavalry. They began to feel like soldiers.

They learned to sleep through discomfort and discovered the long loping march rhythm that would see a man through endless, sun-racked days on heat-baked roads. On Sundays they formed a hollow square for a service of prayer and hymns. Their favorite was “Fight the Good Fight,” while in the evenings, when men were feeling maudlin for their families, they loved to sing “Amazing Grace” very slowly so that the sweet tune lingered in the hot evening air. On other nights of the week groups of men formed Bible classes or prayer meetings, while some played cards or drank the liquor that was sold illegally by peddlers come from Charlottesville or Richmond. Once, when Major Pelham caught such a peddler, he broke the man’s entire stock of stone-bottled mountain whiskey, though the Colonel was less inclined to take the hard line. “Let them have their good time,” Faulconer liked to say.