The four companies that Shanks Evans had left guarding the stone bridge were forced away when northerners under a colonel called William Sherman discovered a ford upstream of the bridge and thus outflanked the tiny afterguard. The men fired a ragged volley, then retreated fast as Sherman’s men advanced across the Bull Run.

A shell exploded above the abandoned bridge, then a blue-coated officer appeared on its far side and signaled its capture by waving his sword toward the northern gun batteries. “Cease fire!” a battery commander shouted. “Sponge out! Horses up! Look lively now!” The bridge was taken, so now the northern army could pour across the Bull Run and complete the encirclement and destruction of the rebel army.

“It is now safe for you gentlemen to advance to the battery position,” Captain James Starbuck announced to the newspapermen, though his announcement was scarcely needed, for groups of excited civilians were already walking or riding toward the captured stone bridge. A congressman waved a smoking cigar at the troops, then stepped aside to let a battery of horse artillery clank and rattle by. “On to Richmond, boys! On to Richmond!” he shouted. “Give the yeller dogs a good whipping, boys! Go on, now!”

A battalion of gray-coated northern infantry followed the horse artillery. The 2nd Wisconsin Regiment wore gray because there had not been enough blue cloth available for their uniforms. “Just hold the good flag high, boys,” their colonel had said, “and the good Lord will know we’re not rebel scum.” Once across the bridge the Wisconsin men swung off the turnpike to march north toward a distant haze of gunsmoke that showed where a stubborn Confederate line still resisted the federal flanking movement. Captain James Starbuck assumed the gray-coated Wisconsin troops would lead the assault on the exposed flank of those rebel defenders, crumpling and destroying them, and thus adding to the God-given victory that the North was enjoying. Almighty God, James thought piously, had been pleased to bless his country on this Lord’s Day. God’s vengeance had been swift, his justice mighty, and his victory overwhelming, and even the godless foreign military attachés were offering congratulations. “This is exactly what Brigadier General McDowell planned,” James said, loyally ascribing God’s doings to the northern general. “We anticipated an initial resistance, gentlemen, then a sudden collapse and a progressive destruction of the enemy positions.”

The Frenchman, Colonel Lassan, alone seemed sceptical, wondering why there had been so little evidence of any Confederate artillery fire. “Perhaps they are saving their gunfire?” he suggested to James.

“I would rather suggest, sir,” James bridled at the Frenchman’s scepticism, “that the rebels lack the necessary professional skills to deploy their guns efficiently.”

“Ah! That must be it, Captain, indeed.”