“Sometime tomorrow, I guess.” The staff officer’s cigar glowed briefly. “The Yankees are up thataway,” he gestured vaguely eastward with his lit cigar, “and I guess we’ll be crossing the river to give them a howdy, but the general won’t be giving his orders till morning. I’ll tell you how to find him, and you be there at six, Colonel. That’ll give you boys time to have yourselves a prayer service first.”

“A prayer service?” Faulconer’s tone suggested the staff officer was touched in the head.

“Tomorrow’s the Lord’s Day, Colonel,” the captain said reproachfully, and so it would be, for the next day would be Sunday, July 21, 1861.

And America would be broken by battle.

By two o’clock on Sunday morning the air was already stifling hot and breathlessly calm. The sun would not rise for another two and a half hours yet, and the sky was still star bright, cloudless and brilliant. Most of the men, even though they had lugged their tents the long five miles from the rail junction to the farm, slept in the open air. Starbuck woke to see the heavens like a brilliant scatter of cold white light, more beautiful than anything found on earth.

“Time to get up,” Adam said beside him.

Men were waking all around the hilltop. They were coughing and cursing, their voices made loud by nervousness. Somewhere in the dark valley a set of harness chains jangled and a horse whinnied, and a trumpet called reveille from a far encampment, its sound echoing back from a distant dark slope. A cockerel crowed from the farmhouse on the hill where dim lights showed behind curtained windows. Dogs barked and the cooks banged skillets and kettles.

“‘The armorers’”—Starbuck still lay on his back, staring up at the sharp-edged stars—“‘accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.’”

Adam would normally have taken pleasure in capping the quotation, but he was in a silent, subdued mood and so said nothing. All along the Legion’s lines the smoky fires were being coddled into life to throw a garish light on shirt-sleeved men, stands of rifles and the white conical tents. The thickening smoke shimmered the stars.

Starbuck still gazed upward. “‘The cripple tardy-gaited night,’” he quoted again, “‘who like a foul witch doth limp so tediously away.’” He was delivering the quotations to disguise his nervousness. Today, he was thinking, I shall see the elephant.

Adam said nothing. He felt that he had come to the brink of a terrible chaos, like the abyss across which Satan had flown in Paradise Lost, and that was exactly what this war meant for America, Adam thought sadly—the loss of innocence, the loss of sweet perfection. He had joined the Legion to please his father, now he might have to pay the price of that compromise.