The crew was already feeding the monster’s smoking maw with a soaking sponge that would douse the remnants of fire deep in the barrel before the next bag of gunpowder was rammed into the muzzle. Meanwhile the first shell screamed across the meadows, flashed above the bridge, crashed through the wood in a splinter of shattering twigs, then spun hard into the empty hillside beyond the trees. Inside the shell was an ordinary rifle’s percussion cap that was fixed to the front of a heavy metal rod which, when the missile struck the hillside, was thrown violently forward to strike against an iron anvil plate in the shell’s nose. The copper percussion cap was filled with a fulminate of mercury that was unstable enough to explode under such sudden pressure and which thus ignited the gunpowder crammed into the shell’s casing, but the missile had already buried itself three feet into the soft ground and the explosion did little more than quake a few square paces of empty hillside and gout a sudden vent of smoky earth from the riven grass.

“Six and a half seconds.” The mounted artillery officer noted the flight time of the shell aloud, then entered the figure into his notebook.

“You may report that the battle proper began at twenty-one minutes past five,” James Starbuck announced. His ears were still ringing from the violence of the cannon’s report and his horse’s ears were still pricked nervously forward.

“I make it only a quarter past five,” the Harper’s Weekly man said.

“Eighteen minutes past?” The speaker was a French military attaché, one of the half-dozen foreign officers who were observing the battle with Captain James Starbuck.

“Too damned early, whatever the time,” one of the newspapermen yawned.

James Starbuck frowned at the oath, then flinched as the heavy gun crashed its second shot toward the stone bridge. The percussive sound of the gun’s firing thumped across the green countryside and seemed far more impressive than any effect the shell was having on the distant landscape. James desperately wanted to see havoc and maelstrom beyond the stream. He had thought when he had first seen the huge Parrott that a single shell fired from so massive a weapon might serve to panic the rebels, but alas, everything beyond the stream looked oddly calm, and James feared that lack of carnage might seem ridiculous to these foreign soldiers who had all served in Europe’s wars and who, James thought, might therefore be supercilious about these amateurish American efforts.

“A very impressive weapon, Captain.” The French attaché soothed all James’s worries with the generous remark.