Those northern reinforcements came, but the southerners were being reinforced too as Beauregard at last realized that his whole plan of battle had been wrong. It had been about as wrong as any plan could be wrong, but now he was making amends by plucking men from his unbloodied right and hurrying them toward the plateau about the Henry House. Irvin McDowell, irritated that such a stubborn defense was delaying the sweet moment of victory, was busy ordering more men up the slope and into the sights of Captain Imboden’s cannon and into the ghastly carnage of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s canister, and into range of General Thomas Jackson’s rifle-muskets.

And thus the day’s real dying had begun.

It began because a battle of motion, of outflanking, advance and retreat, had become a standoff fight. The hilltop was bare of trees, devoid of ditch or wall, just an open space for death, and death grasped at it greedily. Men loaded and fired, fell and bled, cursed and died, and still more men filed onto the plateau to extend death’s grip. Twin lines of infantry were stalled just a hundred paces apart and there tried to blast the guts out of each other. Men from New York and New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts shot at men from Mississippi and Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, Maryland and Tennessee. The wounded crawled back to collapse in the grass, the dead were hurled aside, the files closed on the center, the regiments shrank, yet still the firing went on beneath the bright flags. The northerners, firing again and again at the Confederate lines, knew that they only needed to break this small army, capture Richmond, and the whole conceit of a Southern Confederacy would collapse like a rotten pumpkin, while the southerners, returning bullet for bullet, knew that the North, once bloodied, would think twice before they dared invade the sovereign and sacred soil of the South again.

And so, for their twin causes, men fought beneath the colors, though, in the windless heat, the real trophies of the day were the opposing guns, for the side that could silence their enemy’s guns was the side likeliest to win the struggle. None of the guns was emplaced behind earthworks, for none of the generals had planned to fight on this bare plateau, and so the gunners were vulnerable to infantry fire because there was not room on the hilltop for men to stand off at a distance. This was a belly-to-belly brawl, a murderous gutter fight.