James Starbuck came to the hilltop. He no longer searched for trophies that his victorious general could lay before the president’s feet. Instead he came to discover just what had gone wrong on the smoke-wreathed plateau. “Tell me what’s happening, Starbuck,” Irvin McDowell had ordered his aide. “Off you go!” McDowell had sent six other men on similar errands, but had not thought to visit the plateau himself. In truth McDowell was swamped by the noise and the uncertainty and simply wanted an aide to come back with good news of victory.

James urged his horse up the shell-scarred hillside to where he found hell. His horse, devoid of guidance, ambled slowly forward to where a New York regiment, newly ordered to the hilltop, marched with fixed bayonets toward the enemy line, and it seemed to James that the whole southern army suddenly flowered in flame, a great fence of flame which turned to a rolling bank of smoke, and the New Yorkers just shuddered to a stop, and then another southern volley came from their flank and the New Yorkers stepped backward, leaving their dead and dying, and James saw the ramrods working as the men tried to return the fire, but the New York regiment had attacked alone, without flank support, and they had no chance against the southern volleys that enfiladed and confronted and decimated them. James tried to cheer them on, but his mouth was too dry to make words.

Then James’s world obliterated itself. His horse literally jumped beneath him, then reared up its head to scream as it collapsed. A southern shell had exploded dead under its belly, eviscerating the beast and James, stunned, deafened and screaming for help, sprawled clumsily off the collapsing mass of guts and blood and flesh and hooves. He scrambled away on all fours, suddenly throwing up the contents of his distended belly. He stayed on all fours, retching foully, then managed to stagger to his feet. He slipped in a puddle of his horse’s blood, then stood again and staggered toward the wooden house that lay at the center of the federal battle line and seemed to offer a kind of refuge, though, as he got closer, he saw how the little building had been splintered and riven and scorched by bullets and shells. James leaned on the springhouse in the yard and tried to make sense of his world, but all he could think about was the welter of horse’s blood into which he had fallen. His ears still rang from the explosion.