The Legion paraded at half past four by which time the hilltop was bathed in a ghostly twilight and the farther hills were dark shapes receding ever more obscurely until, at last, there was nothing but an opaque darkness in which dimly mysterious points of red light suggested far-off camp fires. There was just enough gray half-light to see that the nearer countryside was littered with carts and wagons, giving the scene an odd resemblance to a camp meeting site on the morning after the preaching had ended, except that among these wagons were the satanic shapes of limbers, portable forges and cannons. The smoke of the dying camp fires clung in the hollows like mist beneath the last fading stars. Somewhere a band was playing “Home, Sweet Home” and a man in B Company tunelessly sang the words until a sergeant told him to be silent.

The Legion waited. Their heavy packs, blankets and ground-sheets had been piled with the tents at the rear of the band so that the men would simply carry their weapons, haversacks and canteens into battle. Around them, mostly unseen, an army took up its positions. Pickets gazed across the stream, gunners sipped coffee beside their monstrous guns, cavalrymen watered horses in the dozen streams that laced the pastureland, and surgeons’ assistants tore up lint for bandages or sharpened flesh knives and bone saws. A few officers galloped importantly across the fields, vanishing into the farther darknesses on their mysterious errands.

Starbuck sat on Pocahontas just behind the Legion’s color party and wondered if he was dreaming. Was there really to be a battle? The short-tempered Evans had hinted as much and everyone seemed to expect one, yet there was no sign of any enemy. He half-wanted the expectations to be true, and was half-terrified that they would come true. Intellectually he knew that battle was chaotic, cruel and bitter, yet he could not rid himself of the belief that it would turn out to be glorious, plumed and oddly calm. In books, stern-faced men waited to see the whites of their enemies’ eyes, then fired and won great victories. Horses pranced and flags whipped in a smokeless wind beneath which the decorous dead lay sleeping and the pain-free dying spoke lovingly of their country and of their mothers. Men died as simply as Major Pelham had died. Oh sweet Jesus, Starbuck prayed as a sudden burst of terror whipsawed through his thoughts, but don’t let me die. I regret all my sins, every one of them, even Sally, and I will never sin again if you will just let me live.