A Wisconsin soldier, his face a mask of white, was sitting beside him, and James slowly became aware that the man’s head was half-severed by a shell fragment and his brains exposed. “No,” James said, “no!” Inside the house a woman was wailing while somewhere in the distance it sounded as though a whole army of women was wailing. James pushed away the springhouse and staggered toward a regiment of infantry. They were Massachusetts men, his own people, and he stood close beside their colors and saw the heap of dead that had been thrown up behind the flags, and even as he watched, another man crumpled down. The flags were a target for enemy marksmen, a bright-starred invitation to death, but as soon as the color bearer fell another man plucked up the staff and held the standards high.

“Starbuck!” a voice shouted. It was a major whom James knew as a dour and canny attorney in Boston, but for some reason, although James must have met the man every week at the Lawyer’s Club, he could not place his name. “Where’s McDowell?” the major shouted.

“Down by the turnpike.” James managed to sound reasonably coherent.

“He should be here!” A shell screamed overhead. The major, a thin and gray-haired man with a neatly clipped beard, shuddered as the missile exploded somewhere behind. “Damn them!”

Damn who, James wondered, then was astonished that he had used the swear word, even silently in his thoughts.

“We’re fighting them piecemeal!” The Boston attorney tried to explain the northern army’s predicament. “It won’t do!”

“What do you mean?” James had to shout to make himself heard over the constant crash of gunnery. What was this man’s name? He remembered how the attorney was a terrier in cross-examination, never letting go of a witness till he had shaken the evidence free, and James remembered how, famously, the man had once lost his temper with Chief Justice Shaw, complaining in open court that Shaw was intellectually and judicially costive, for which contempt Shaw had first fined him, and had then purchased him supper. What was the man’s name?

“The attacks should coincide! We need a general officer to coordinate affairs.” The major stopped abruptly.

James, who was always made uncomfortable by criticism of constituted authority, tried to explain that General McDowell was undoubtedly aware of what was happening, but then he stopped talking because the major was swaying. James put out a hand, the major gripped it with a demonic force, and then opened his mouth, but instead of speaking he just voided a great flow of blood. “Oh, no,” the major managed to say, then he slumped down to James’s feet. James felt himself shaking. This was a nightmare, and he felt most terrible, abject and shameful fear. “Tell my dear Abigail,” the dying major said, and he looked pathetically up at James, and James still could not remember the man’s name.