A second Confederate artillery battery came to the hilltop and deployed its weapons close to where the Faulconer Legion’s baggage was piled. The battery commander was an Episcopal minister who ordered his second in command to check and recheck the battery’s wormscrews, sponge covers, scrapers, handspikes and rammers, while he himself prayed aloud that God would have mercy on the Yankees’ guilty souls that he intended to send to a better world with his four big guns that he had named for the four evangelists. Thomas Jackson, expecting an enemy cannonade at any moment, ordered his men to lie flat so as not to make themselves a target for the enemy gunners, then he calmly sat in his saddle reading his Bible. He worried that his men might get confused in the smoke of battle, and so all his Virginians had strips of white cloth tied to their arms or tucked into their hatbands, and were under orders to shout a watchword as they fought. “Our Homes!” was their cry, and Jackson expected them to strike their breasts with their left hands as they shouted it. Captain Imboden, the lawyer turned gunner, had long decided that Jackson was mad as a March hare, but he was somehow glad that he was on Jackson’s side and not having to face the madman in battle.

A mile to Imboden’s right, at the stone bridge where more and more northern troops crossed the Bull Run to continue the crushing attack that had at last begun to roll the rebel army into chaos, General Irvin McDowell sat on his horse beside the turnpike and cheered on his men. “Victory, boys!” he called again and again. “Victory! On to Richmond! Well done, boys, well done!” McDowell was jubilant, ecstatic, so happy that he could forget the dyspepsia that had plagued him ever since his injudiciously large helpings of beef pie at supper the previous night. What did indigestion matter? He had won! He had led the largest army in the history of American warfare to a brilliant victory, and just as soon as the chore of cleaning up the rebel army was completed he would send a sheaf of captured colors back to Washington to be laid as trophies at the president’s feet. Not that he had seen any captured colors yet, but he was certain they would soon come in abundance. “Starbuck!” He spotted his sous-adjutant surrounded by foreign attachés in their gaudy uniforms. McDowell had gone to college in France and was used to European military fashions, but now, seeing the bright uniforms amid the plain honest coats of his own army, he thought how ridiculously ornate the foreigners appeared. “Captain Starbuck!” he called again.

“Sir?” Captain James Starbuck had been happily beating time to the music of a regimental band that was playing opera selections to the advancing troops. Now he urged his horse closer to the victorious general.