“You want an apple, mister?” A South Carolina prisoner, released now, had been searching among the knapsacks that had spilled from the fallen gun limber and now plucked some apples from among the bloody wreckage. He tossed the jubilant officer a bright red apple. “Go whip ’em some more!”

The officer caught the apple. Behind him the first southern infantry was advancing toward the Bull Run. Starbuck watched for a while, then turned away. War’s lottery had freed him yet again, and he had one more promise yet to keep.

Tired men collected the wounded, those they could find. Some of the injured were in woodland, and doomed to slow and forgotten deaths in the undergrowth. Thirsty men looked for water while some just drank the fouled liquid in the cannons’ sponge buckets, gulping down the gunpowder debris along with the warm, salty liquid. The small wind was brisker now, stirring the camp fires that men made from shattered musket stocks and fence rails.

The rebels were in no state to pursue the federal troops, and so they stayed on the battlefield and stared in dazed astonishment at the plunder of victory—at the guns and wagons and caissons, at the mounds of captured stores and at the hordes of prisoners. A fat congressman from Rochester, New York, was among those prisoners; he had been found trying to hide his vast belly behind a slim sapling and had been brought to the army headquarters where he blustered about the importance of his position and demanding to be released. A rail-thin Georgian soldier told him to shut his damned fat mouth before he had his damned fat tongue cut out to be cooked and served with an apple sauce and the congressman fell instantly silent.