“He should have stayed at home with his mother,” Major Bird said. His right hand was clawing at his beard, betraying his nerves. “Blanche was ridiculously overprotective of that boy, as I discovered when I insisted he was ready to imbibe logarithms. Oh, Christ!” Major Bird’s imprecation was caused by a sudden volley loosed by the neighboring South Carolinians who were firing over the heads of their own skirmishers. “Actually he mastered logs very quickly,” Bird went on, “and he was by far my best pupil for construing Greek. A clever boy, but prone to tears. Highly strung, you see? A waste though, a terrible waste. Why doesn’t war take the illiterates first?”

A fresh artillery battery on the enemy’s right wing had opened fire and one of its shells struck the slope a hundred paces in front of the Legion and ricocheted up into the trees. Starbuck heard the missile rip through the branches overhead. A second shell plunged into the ground close to the skirmish line and there exploded underground to heave the red soil up in a sudden eruption of brown smoke. Some of the skirmishers edged backward.

“Stand still!” Truslow bellowed, and not only the skirmishers, but the Legion’s other eight companies froze like rabbits faced by a wildcat. The eight companies at the trees’ edge were in two ranks, the formation suggested by the drill books that Major Pelham and Colonel Faulconer had used in the Legion’s training. The books were American translations of French infantry manuals and recommended that riflemen open fire at long range, then sprint forward to finish off the enemy with bayonet thrusts. Major Bird, who had assiduously studied the manuals, believed they were nonsense. In practice the Legion had never proved accurate when firing their rifles at more than one hundred paces, and Bird did not understand how they were supposed to shake an enemy’s composure with ill-aimed fire at twice that distance followed by a clumsy charge into the teeth of hostile artillery and rifle fire. The Colonel’s airy answer had always been that the men’s natural belligerence would overcome the tactical difficulties, but to Major Bird that seemed a problematical and overoptimistic solution.

“Permission to open fire?” Captain Murphy shouted from Company D.