“You need rest,” the doctor said calmly, “you need healing. If you exert yourself, Washington, you’ll invite the gangrene. Three weeks of exertion and you’ll be dead. Let’s fashion a sling for that arm.”

A thunderous crash of musketry announced that Jackson’s Virginians were greeting the enemy. The battle was now being fought on the plateau about the Henry House, a flat hilltop edged with flame and thunder. The waiting Confederate guns tore great gaps in the advancing federal lines, but the northern infantry outflanked the batteries and forced them back, and northern guns unlimbered to take the rebel cannon in the flank. To Captain Imboden, the lawyer turned gunner, the ground around his outnumbered cannon looked as though it was being truffled by a horde of hungry hogs. The northern shells burrowed deep before exploding, but some were finding more solid targets. One of Imboden’s limbers exploded from a direct hit and one of his gunners screamed in brief, foul gasps as his guts were sliced open by a jagged-edged scrap of shell casing. More gunners dropped to the marksmanship of northern sharpshooters. Imboden was serving one of his guns, ramming a canister down on top of a roundshot, then stepping back as the lanyard was pulled and the lethal missiles flensed through a northern regiment of infantry that was advancing through the smoke and stench.

The flags were bright squares of color in the gray. Stars and Stripes came forward while the three stripes of the Confederacy edged backward, but then stopped where Thomas Jackson, his well-thumbed Bible safe in his saddlebag, had decreed they would stop. Jackson’s men stood hard in the smoke and discovered that the hated hours of drill were transmuted by battle into the unconscious motions of efficiency, and that somehow, despite the flail of northern canister and musketry, and despite the terror of men surrounded by the screaming of the wounded, the sobbing of the dying, the horrors of shattered flesh and of disemboweled friends, their hands still kept ramming bullets and charges, kept feeding percussion caps onto cones, kept aiming, kept firing. Still kept fighting. They were terrified, but they had been trained, and the man who had trained them glowered at them, and so they stayed like a stone wall built across a hilltop.

And the northern attack broke on the wall.

Jackson’s Virginians should have been beaten. They should have been swept away like a sand ridge struck by a sea, expect they did not know the battle had been lost and so they fought on, even edged forward, and the northerners wondered how you were supposed to beat these bastards, and the fear lodged in the northern hearts and the southerners edged another pace forward over dry grass scorched by burning cartridge wadding. The federals looked behind for reinforcements.