“Vanished. Hit by a shell. Looks like something left on a butcher’s slab.” Bird’s words were callous, but the tone of his voice was regretful.

“Poor Jenkins.” Starbuck had not particularly liked Roswell Jenkins, who had distributed bottles of whiskey to ensure his election as an officer and who had left the running of his company to Sergeant Truslow. “So who’ll take over A Company?”

“Whoever my brother-in-law wishes, or rather whoever Truslow wants.” Bird laughed, then turned the pecking motion of his head into a rueful shake. “If there’s any point in anyone taking over at all? Because maybe there’ll be no Legion left?” Bird paused. “Maybe there’ll be no Confederacy left?” Bird involuntarily ducked as a shell fragment whipped overhead to smack into a tree just six inches above Starbuck’s head. Bird straightened up and took out one of his dark cigars. “You’d like one?”

“Please.” Since that night with Belvedere Delaney in Richmond, Starbuck had found himself smoking more and more cigars.

“Do you have any water?” Bird asked as he handed the cigar to Starbuck.

“No.”

“We seem to have exhausted our water. Doc Billy wanted some for the wounded, but there isn’t any and I can’t spare anyone to find more. There’s so much we overlooked.” A crashing volley of musketry sounded to the north, evidence that more Confederate troops had come into action. Starbuck had seen at least two more southern regiments join the right flank of Nathan Evans’s makeshift line, but for every fresh man from Alabama and Mississippi there were at least three northerners, and the reinforced Yankees were sending ever more troops up the slope to lay their weight of rifle fire at the thin-scraped rebel line. “It can’t be long now,” Major Bird said ruefully, “it can’t be long.”

A South Carolinian officer came running up the tree line. “Major Bird? Major Bird?”

“Here!” Bird stepped away from Starbuck.

“Colonel Evans wants you all to advance, Major.” The South Carolinian had a powder-blackened face, a ripped tunic and bloodshot eyes. His voice was hoarse. “The Colonel’s going to sound a bugle call, and he wants us all to make a charge.” The man paused as though he knew that he was asking the impossible, then he tried a direct appeal to patriotism. “One last real good charge, Major, for the South.”

For a second it looked as if Major Bird would laugh at such a naked appeal to his patriotism, but then he nodded. “Of course.”

For the South, one last mad charge, one last defiant gesture.

Before the battle and the cause were lost.