“Fire!” Truslow shouted at his men. A sixteen-year-old screamed when a cartridge load of powder exploded in his face as he poured it into the hot barrel of his rifle. Robert Decker fired a shotgun into the smoke cloud. The grass of the meadow was flickering with small fires started by the burning wads from the rifle barrels. An injured man crawled back toward the tree line, attempted to clamber over the clutter of fallen fence rails, and there collapsed. His body seemed to shiver, then was still. An officer’s horse lay dead, its body shuddering as northern bullets thudded home, but the Yankee fire was sporadic as the Rhode Islanders, too frightened to stand still and reload properly, stepped backward. The rebels screamed defiance and spat bullets into hot barrels, rammed the charges hard home, pulled their triggers, then started the process again. Starbuck watched the Legion fight its first battle and was struck by the atmosphere of glee, of sheer release, of carnival enjoyment. Even their soldiers’ screams sounded to Starbuck like the mad whoops of overexcited children. Groups of men were darting forward, emulating the Zouaves’ charge, and driving the demoralized Rhode Islanders farther back down the long slope where the first Yankee charge had been stopped cold.

Yet a second Yankee attack line was already halfway up the slope and still more northern troops were coming from the Sudley Road. A U.S. Marine regiment was there, together with three fresh regiments of New York volunteers. More field guns appeared, and the first Yankee cavalry galloped off to the left of their line as the fresh northern infantry marched stoically into the open land to reinforce the ragged remnants of the first attack, which had retreated two hundred paces back from the litter of bodies and the line of slick bloody grass and scorched turf that marked the high-tide line of their first failed assault.

“Form line! Form line!” The shout started somewhere in the center of the Confederate formation, and somehow enough sane officers and sergeants heard the order and echoed it, and slowly the screaming, maddened rebels were brought back to the fence line. They were grinning and laughing, full of pride for what they had done. Every now and then a man would whoop for no apparent reason, or else a man might turn around to blast a bullet at the stalled northern attack. Insults were hurled down the long slope.

“Go back to your mothers, Yankees!”

“Send some real men next time!”

“So how do you like a Virginia welcome, you yellow bastards!”

“Silence!” Major Bird shouted. “Silence!”