Starbuck laughed and stepped back. Above him the hill smoked like a volcano and the shells cracked and the rifle fire splintered and the wounded limped back to the crossroads where the prisoners waited for jail and the Yankees waited for victory and the dead waited for burial. Starbuck, ignored now by the sergeant who no longer seemed to care whether he joined the other prisoners or not, sat with his back against the sunwarmed stone of the house and closed his eyes and wondered what his future held. He supposed the whole southern rebellion was being beaten to death in these hot fields, and he thought how much he would regret the premature ending of this war. He had seen the elephant, and he wanted to see more of it. It was not the horror that attracted him; not the memory of the severed leg spinning across the road, nor the man’s face disappearing in powder smoke and gore, but rather the rearrangement of all creation that appealed to Starbuck’s soul. War, Starbuck had learned this day, took everything that was, shook it, and let the pieces fall where they might. War was a gigantic game of chance, a huge gamble, a denial of all predestination and prudence. War would have saved Starbuck from the fate of family respectability, while peace was duty. War had relieved him of obligation, but peace offered dullness, and Nathaniel Starbuck was young enough and self-confident enough to hate dullness above all other things in the world.

But now he was a prisoner and the battle hammered on while, warmed by the sun and wearied by the day, Starbuck slept.

The Remnants Of The...

THE REMNANTS OF THE FAULCONER LEGION HAD STUMBLED UPHILL to where, in a tangle of small woods and fields behind Jackson’s Virginia Brigade, the survivors of Nathan Evans’s force recovered. The men were exhausted. At Evans’s insistence they made a crude line that faced toward the Bull Run, but they were on the flank of the reconstituted southern defense and far enough from the turnpike to be spared the renewed federal attacks. The men sat on the grass, dull-eyed and thirsty, wondering if there would be any food or water.