Adam feared that his father was trying too hard to be popular, yet in fairness the lenience was all a part of Washington Faulconer’s theory of soldiering. “These men aren’t European peasants,” the Colonel explained, “and they certainly ain’t northern factory drudges. These are good Americans! Good southerners! They’ve got fire in their bellies and liberty in their hearts and if we force them into hours of drill and yet more drill and still more drill we’ll simply dull them into witless fools. I want them eager! I want them to go into battle like horses fresh off a spring pasture, not like nags coming off winter hay. I want them full of spirit, élan, the French call it, and it’s going to win us this war!”

“Not without drill, it won’t,” Major Pelham would answer gloomily. He was allowed to give four hours of drill a day and not a minute more. “I’ll warrant Robert Lee is drilling his men in Richmond,” Pelham would insist, “and McDowell his in Washington!”

“I warrant they are too, and so they should, just to keep the rogues out of mischief. But our rogues are better quality. They’re going to make the best soldiers in America! In the world!” And when the Colonel was in this sublime mood neither Pelham, nor all the military experts in Christendom could have changed his mind.

So Sergeant Truslow simply ignored the Colonel and made his company do the extra drill anyway. At first, when Truslow had come down from his high home in the hills, the Colonel had imagined employing him as one of the fifty cavalrymen who would be the Legion’s outriders and scouts, but somehow, after the raid, the Colonel felt less willing to have Truslow so close to headquarters, and so he had let Truslow become company sergeant to Company K, one of the two skirmishing companies, but even from there, on the outer flank of the Legion, Truslow’s influence was baleful. Soldiering, he said, was about winning battles, not about holding prayer meetings or hymn singing, and he immediately insisted that Company K triple the amount of time it spent in drill. He had the company out of bed two hours before dawn and, by the time the other companies were just beginning to light their breakfast fires, Company K was already tired. Captain Roswell Jennings, K Company’s commanding officer who had secured his election with lavish quantities of homemade whiskey, was happy so long as Truslow did not demand his presence at the extra sessions.