Blythe and Case found shelter behind a boulder, where they shared a cigar as the canister rattled and sighed and slapped the air around them. Dennison’s company had scattered in confusion. A few kept going forward, others lay flat, but most ran panicking toward their left where the battalion’s remaining companies offered an illusion of shelter. Case hunched down beside Blythe. “This is nothing to Sevastopol,” he said. “The damned Ivans shelled us day and night, day and night. Never let up for a minute.”

“Experienced men, that’s who I’ll be looking for,” Blythe said, handing the cigar back to his companion.

Case grimaced. “So what do we do about Starbuck?” he asked.

“Just wait on the good Lord, Bobby, wait on the Lord and He will provide. Don’t the good book say that?”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“I’m biding my time, Bobby, but that time will come. I don’t see no point in being too eager in battle. Hell, we need heroes, but some of us have to live to go home at war’s end. Otherwise the Yankees will be plowing our wives and we’ll be rotting in our graves.”

Case peered about the boulder, looking at Starbuck’s distant figure. “Can’t do much without a rifle.”

“Rifles will be found. Hell, I don’t want to command no battalion without rifles.” Blythe laughed. He was lining up his allies and doing what he loved to do. He was surviving and thriving, and he reckoned he was good at that because he took a long view of life, and dying in battle was no part of that view. He would survive.

The crash of the enemy guns stunned Starbuck into silence. He had promised his men there would be no cannon and that they could walk through the valley without fear of slaughter, but now the enemy gunners were swabbing, reloading, and ramming another volley of canister. The fear roared in Starbuck, weakening his legs and threatening to make him whimper like a whipped child. He kept going forward, not out of bravery, but because he seemed incapable of changing his direction or pace. He wanted to shout at Potter to take his skirmishers up the slope toward the gunners, but no sound would come, and so he stumbled blindly on with his mind groping for a prayer that he could not articulate. The terror was unmanning him, and that thought jarred him and he wondered if he could ever face a terror like it again. His foot slipped in a crusted patch of cow dung and vomit rimmed his throat. He fought it down, gasping for air, and he was sure that the men of the Special Battalion, whom he was leading into a murderous cannon fire just as he had led the Legion into a Yankee artillery trap at Chantilly, were despising him. He looked to his right and was astonished to see a vast gap in the brigade’s line. The Legion was missing, though beyond the gap he could see the kinked line of attacking men sweeping across the smoke-smeared pasture beneath the red and blue flags. Dennison’s company had vanished and half of Cartwright’s was gone, but the rest of the battalion was still going forward, though no longer in neat ranks. The men had spread into the gap left by Dennison’s company and some part of Starbuck’s scrambled thoughts recognized that the scattering would protect them from the canister.