A mounted artillery officer consulted his watch. In the years to come he wanted to tell his children and grandchildren the exact moment at which his great gun had signaled the beginning of the rebellion’s end. By his watch it was just approaching eighteen minutes past five in the morning, a mere twelve minutes since the sun had first burst its brilliance across the eastern horizon. The artillery officer, a lieutenant, had entered that moment of sunrise in his diary, though he had also meticulously noted that his watch was liable to gain or lose five minutes in any one day, depending on the temperature.

“Ready!” the gunner sergeant called again, this time with a touch of impatience in his voice.

The artillery lieutenant waited till the watch’s hand exactly pointed to the speck that marked the eighteenth minute, then dropped his right hand. “Fire!”

The sergeant snatched the lanyard and the small crosspiece scraped violently across the fulminate. Fire flashed down the copper tube and the powder bag ignited to hurl the shell forward. The base of the shell was a cup of soft brass that expanded to grip the Parrott gun’s rifled barrel and start the shell spinning.

The noise exploded violently across the landscape, startling birds up from the trees and thumping the eardrums of the thousands of men who waited for the orders to advance. The gun itself was hurled backward, its trail gouging the soil and its wheels bouncing a clear eighteen inches up from the ground and coming to rest a full seven feet back from where the gun had been fired. In front of the fuming barrel was a scorched patch of turf beneath a roiling cloud of dirty white smoke. Onlookers who had never heard a great gun fired gasped at the sheer fury of the sound, at the appalling crack of the cannon’s firing, which promised a horrid destruction on the far side of the stream.