“Sous is French for ‘under.’” James suspected that the newspaperman who came from the self-proclaimed “Journal of Civilization” knew full well what sous meant.

“Does that mean you’re a kind of inferior adjutant, Cap’n?”

“It means I am an assistant to the adjutant.” James had managed to keep his temper, despite feeling distinctly out of sorts. He had managed but two hours sleep and had woken to a sharp attack of flatulence that he acknowledged to be entirely his own fault. Brigadier General McDowell was a famous trencherman who had last night encouraged his staff to eat well, and James, despite his conviction that ample nourishment was necessary for both spiritual and bodily health, wondered if a third helping of the general’s beef pie had been a plateful too much. Then there had also been the hotcakes and custard, all consumed with the teetotal general’s well-sugared lemonade. Such indulgence would not have mattered if James had been able to take a spoonful of his mother’s carminative balsam before retiring, but his fool of a servant had forgotten to put James’s medicine chest into the headquarter’s baggage wagons and so James had been forced to field the inquisitive reporters’ questions and, at the same time, hide the exquisite discomfort of a severe attack of indigestion.

The newspapermen, meeting James in the farmhouse at Centreville where he had spent his uncomfortable night, had demanded to know McDowell’s intentions, and James had explained, as simply as he could, that the general envisaged nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the rebellion. An hour’s march to the south of the Bull Run stream was the small town of Manassas Junction and, once that town was captured, the rail line that linked the two rebel armies in Northern Virginia would be severed. General Johnston could no longer come from the Shenandoah Valley to support Beauregard, so Beauregard’s defeated rebel army, cut off from that reinforcement, must retreat to Richmond and there be captured. The war would then peter out as the scattered rebel forces were either defeated or gave up. James had made it all sound very predictable and rather obvious.