Someone began laughing, a hysterical mad laugh. Someone else cheered. At the foot of the slope the northern guns opened fire again, screaming their shells up to the ridge to blast apart in dark-flamed smoke. The short-barreled northern howitzers had never ceased to fire, lobbing spherical case shot high over the Rhode Islanders and New Yorkers to crash raggedly about the edge of the woods.

“Back to the trees! Back to the trees!” The order was repeated down the rebel line and the southerners retreated back into the shadows. In front of them, where the powder smoke cleared slowly from the burnt grass, a handful of bodies lay on either side of the remnants of rail fence while beyond the fence, in the brighter sunlight, a scattering of dead northerners was sprawled in the pasture. The officer with red side-whiskers lay there with his mouth open and his gold-rimmed spectacles half-fallen off his face. A crow flapped down to land near the man’s body. A wounded northerner pulled himself toward the trees, asking for water, but no one in the Legion had any water. They had emptied their canteens and now the sun was beating hotter and their mouths were dried by the saltpeter in the gunpowder, but there was no water, and ahead of them were yet more Yankees coming from the far trees to reignite the attack.

“We’ll do it to them again, boys! We’ll do it to them again,” Major Bird shouted, and even though the chaos of the Legion’s first fight had not given him a chance to fully test his theory of musketry, he suddenly knew he had achieved something far more valuable; he had discovered an activity he utterly enjoyed. For all of his adult life Thaddeus Bird had been faced with the classic dilemma of a poor relation, which was whether to show an eternal deferential gratitude or to demonstrate an independency of mind by cultivating a prickly opposition to every prevailing orthodoxy, which latter course had pleased Bird until, in the smoke and excitement of battle, there had been no need to posture. Now he paced behind his men, watching the new northern attack take shape and felt strangely content. “Load your guns,” he called in a firm voice, “but hold your fire! Load your guns, but hold your fire.”

“Go for their bellies, boys,” Murphy called aloud. “Put them down hard and the rest will go home.”