“Tell Abigail what?” he asked stupidly, but the Major was dead, and James shook the corpse’s hand away and felt a terrible, terrible sadness that he was going to die without ever knowing the pleasures of this world. He would die and there was no one who would really miss him, no one who would truly mourn him, and James stared at the sky and howled a self-pitying cry, then he managed to fumble his revolver from its stiff-leather holster and he aimed it vaguely in the direction of the Confederate army and pulled its trigger time and again to spit its bullets into a smoke cloud. Each single shot was a protest and a revenge for his own cautious nature.

The Massachusetts regiment stumbled forward. They were no longer in line but had coalesced into small groups of men that now sidled between the dead and dying. They talked to one another as they fought, cheering one another on, offering praise and small jests. “Hey, reb! Here’s a lead pill for your sickness!” a man shouted, then fired.

“You all right, Billy?”

“Gun’s all choked up.” The minié bullets expanded in the barrels as their hollowed-out backs were swollen by the powder gases to grip the rifling and so give the missile a deadly accurate spin. The friction of the expanded bullet scraping through the barrel was supposed to clean the fouled powder deposits from the rifling, but the theory did not work and the harsh deposits still accreted to make the guns terribly hard for a tired man to load.

“Here, reb! Here’s one for you!”

“Christ! That was close.”

“No use ducking, Robby, they’ve gone past before you hear ’em.”

“Anyone got a shot? Someone give me a cartridge!”

James took comfort from the quiet words and edged closer to the nearest group of men. The commanding officer of the Massachusetts regiment had started the day as a lieutenant and now shouted at the survivors to advance, and so they tried, shouting a harsh defiance from their raw throats, but then two Confederate six pounders took the regiment’s open flank with barrel loads of canister and the musket balls whipped along the survivors, decimating their groups and bloodying the slippery turf with still more blood. The Massachusetts men stepped back. James reloaded his revolver. He was close enough to see the dirty faces of the enemy, to see their eyes showing white through the powder stains on their skin, to see their unbuttoned coats and loose shirts. He saw a rebel fall down, clutching at his knee, then crawl away to the rear. He saw a rebel officer with long fair mustaches screaming encouragement at his men. The man’s coat hung open and his trousers were belted with a length of rope. James took careful aim at the man, fired, but his revolver’s smoke obscured the effect of his shot.