“Shut your mouth, get inside, do what you’re told,” the sergeant snapped, then ordered the unwounded prisoners to look after the dozen wounded men who had been brought into the open air to recover from their surgery. Inside the house Starbuck found still more men from the Faulconer Legion; one from K Company had lost a leg from a shell burst, two had lungs punctured by bullets, one had been blinded and another had a minié bullet lodged in his lower jaw that now dribbled a mixture of blood and spittle.

A red-bearded doctor was working at a table that had been shoved into the sunlight coming through the kitchen window. He was amputating a man’s leg, and his bone saw made a grating noise that set Starbuck’s teeth on edge. The patient, a northerner, groaned horribly and the doctor’s assistant dripped more chloroform onto the pad he was holding against the man’s nose and mouth. Both the doctor and his assistant were dripping with sweat. The room was foully hot, not just with the day’s natural warmth, but also because a fierce fire in the kitchen range was being used to boil water.

The doctor discarded the saw and picked up a long-bladed scalpel with which he finished the amputation. The bloody leg, still clad in a boot and sock, thumped to the floor. “A change from treating the pox,” the doctor said happily, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “That’s all we’ve done for the last three months, treat the pox! You southerners needn’t have bothered raising an army, you could have just sent all your whores north, then you could have poxed us all to death and saved us a heap of trouble. He’s still with us, is he?” This last question was to the assistant.

“Yes, sir.”

“Give him a whiff of ammonia, let him know he ain’t knocking at the pearly gates yet.” The red-bearded surgeon was probing with forceps for the arteries that needed tying off. He had filed the bone stump smooth and now, with the arteries tied, he let the flesh compress over the bone’s cut end before drawing the flap of skin round the patient’s thigh. He put quick stitches in the newly formed stump, then untied the tourniquet that had constricted the thigh’s blood supply during the operation. “Another hero,” he said dryly to mark the procedure’s end.

“He won’t come round, sir.” The assistant was holding an open bottle of ammonia spirits next to the patient’s nose.