“Damn what Faulconer wants!” Evans screamed so loud that the idling gunners across the turnpike were startled. “Tell Faulconer that the Confederacy needs him! Tell the bastard we have to stop the Yankees or else we’ll all be doing Lincoln’s rope dance tonight! I’m trusting you, boy! Get Faulconer and tell the bastard to fight, damn his eyes! Tell the damp-bellied bastard to fight!” Evans shouted the last words, then savaged his heels back, leaving Starbuck astonished and alone as the staff officers and orderlies streamed after Evans toward the men defending the stone bridge.

Bullets snicked and whimpered in the heavy air. Flies were gathering thick in the ditch to lay their eggs in the gobbets of flesh that had been a man just moments before. Lieutenant Meadows lay on his back with his dead eyes showing surprise and his blood-swilled mouth gaping wide open. Starbuck, the whiskey sour in his belly, gathered the reins, turned Pocahontas’s head, and went to find the Legion.

The Faulconer Legion took its first casualty at around five minutes past eight in the morning. A shell came over the hill to the east, skipped once on the reverse slope, tumbled in the air with a horrid shrieking noise, then struck the ground a second time some twelve yards in front of A Company. The shell exploded there, driving a splinter of jagged iron into the skull of Joe Sparrow, the boy who had a scholarship to the university, but who now died as easy a death as any soldier could wish. One moment he was standing upright, grinning at a joke told by Cyrus Matthews, and the next he was on his back. He twitched once, felt nothing, died.

“Joe?” Cyrus asked.

The other men edged nervously away from the collapsed boy, all but his friend George Waters, who had been standing beside Sparrow in the second rank and who now dropped to his knees beside the body. Sparrow’s cap had been tugged round by the force of the striking shell fragment and George now tried to pull it straight, but as he tugged at the cap’s stiff visor a terrible wash of blood escaped from under the sweatband. “Oh, God!” George Waters recoiled from the horrid sight. “He’s dead!”