“Wait for the line to advance,” Swynyard said, then he turned his horse and rode toward Lieutenant-Colonel Maitland, who was mounted behind the Legion’s center company.

Starbuck walked to the center of his own line where Captain Billy Tumlin stood with the color party. The color was a four-foot-square flag issued from the state armory and it looked a sorry thing compared with the thirty-six-square feet of colored silk that flew above the Legion. Starbuck told Tumlin what the orders were, then walked out ahead of the battalion.

Starbuck’s job was to reassure his men. They had been dubbed failures by the army, then issued with antique guns, and now he had to persuade them to be winners. “They ain’t got cannon!” he shouted, “just muskets.” Almost certainly the Yankees were all armed with rifles, but this was no time for literal truths. “They’re frightened as hell,” he went on. “They’ll probably break just as soon as you get within shouting distance, but if you hesitate, they’ll rally. Not one of you will be killed crossing the valley. Remember that! They don’t have cannon! We’re going to walk across and when I give the order you charge the bastards! Hold your fire until then. No point in wasting a musket shot at long range. Hold your fire, wait for the order to charge, then scream at them! The faster they run, the more equipment they’ll leave behind, and the more you kill, the more boots we get. Now fix bayonets!”

He turned to stare across the ground over which they would advance. The land dropped steeply away to the left where a small stream tumbled toward the Potomac. Harper’s Ferry lay where that river was joined by the smaller Shenandoah, and the confluence was surrounded by three high spurs of land that overlooked the small town. Jackson’s troops now commanded the approaches to all three spurs, and all three were under pressure. Push the Yankees off the high ground and the garrison in the town, which had been swollen by other Northern troops driven to shelter by Jackson’s advance, would be dominated by rebel artillery. Local people had slipped through the Northern lines to tell the rebels that close to twenty thousand Yankees were trapped there, and even allowing for exaggeration, that meant that the town must be crammed with food, weapons, and supplies; all the things the Special Battalion lacked.

Starbuck turned back to look at the battalion that now stood with fixed bayonets. It was a tiny battalion, but no smaller than many others that had been shrunken by war. The Legion was larger, but still Starbuck reckoned that the Legion was down to half the number of men who had marched to Manassas for the war’s first battle. Captain Truslow strolled out from the Legion with a rifle on his shoulder, which, like Starbuck’s, carried no badges of rank. “Your boys, eh?” Truslow said, nodding at the battalion.

“My boys,” Starbuck agreed.

“Any good?”

“About to find out.”