“Give me the chloroform,” the doctor ordered, then took a scalpel to the patient’s torn trousers and cut back the tattered, bloody cloth to reveal the man’s genitals. “Behold a miracle,” the doctor announced and poured a trickle of chloroform onto the unconscious man’s testicles. The man seemed to go into instant spasm, but then opened his eyes, bellowed with pain and tried to sit up. “Frozen balls,” the doctor said happily, “known in the profession as the Lazarus effect.” He stoppered the chloroform bottle and stepped away from the table, looking to his unwilling audience for appreciation of his wit. He spotted Starbuck, sheeted with blood from head to foot. “Christ, but why aren’t you dead?”

“Because I’m not even wounded. It’s someone else’s blood.”

“If you’re not wounded, then get the hell out of here. Go and watch your damned dreams being broken.”

Starbuck went into the yard where he leaned against the house wall. The sun shone cruelly bright on a desolate scene of rebel defeat. To the north, where Evans had led his forlorn companies to stem the triumphant Yankee advance, the meadows were empty, all but for a littering of dead men and broken horses.

The battle had swept across those fields and, like a vast wave pushed by a storm surge, now climbed the hill toward the Henry House, where the attacking line seethed against the second Confederate defense. Nathan Evans had constructed the first barrier out of a flimsy line of men that had stalled the federal attack long enough for Thomas Jackson to make this second line, which the Yankees now set about dismantling. Newly arrived northern cannon were being dragged to the hill’s crest while long blue columns of fresh infantry climbed past the guns to reinforce their comrades who were already assaulting the hill’s top. The rebel guns that had originally lined the crest had been pushed back by the Yankees’ advance. Starbuck, slumped disconsolate beside the kitchen step of the stone house, saw an occasional Confederate round overshoot the plateau and draw a trail of smoke across the sky. Such wasted rounds were evidence that the rebel army still fought, but the turnpike was now so crowded with northern guns and infantry that Starbuck did not see how the fight could ever be sustained.

“What the hell are you doing here?” the officious sergeant demanded of Starbuck.

“The doctor sent me out here.”

“You shouldn’t be here. You should be over there, with the other prisoners.” The sergeant gestured toward the farthest corner of the yard where a small group of unwounded rebels sat under guard.

“The doctor said I should wash this blood off,” Starbuck lied. He had just noticed a well beside the road and he hoped the lie would serve to get him a drink of water.

The sergeant hesitated, then nodded. “Hurry, then.”