The Georgian laughed, took the saws, and walked away while Starbuck’s men stooped to the gun traces and began hauling. The heavy gun creaked and rocked as it gathered way, then it bounced up over the sawn stumps and crashed over the makeshift bridge that filled the ravine. Starbuck ran alongside the gun, cheering the men on. The gunners ran with him, eager to site the weapon and so begin the bombardment that would doom the trapped garrison of Harper’s Ferry. A cheer announced the gun’s emplacement, the first gun to be sited above the doomed town. The limber still had to arrive, but Starbuck’s men had won the race. And in two days, Starbuck reckoned, they ought to be inside the town and with any luck there would be a rich haul of axes, spades, boots, saws, ammunition, rifles; all the things his Special Battalion needed. And after that they would go north and then, Starbuck knew, he would have to face the Yankees in battle. And maybe, he dared to hope, this would be the last battle, for that was the hope of this rebel campaign. Go north, show the Yankees that the South could not be beaten, and then make peace. That was the dream, the reason to cross the Potomac; the hope that the slaughter would end.

THE NORTHERN ARMY GROPED CAUTIOUSLY INTO THE deserted Maryland farmlands, where General McClellan left nothing to chance. He watched his flanks, secured his communications, and advanced his forward units at the pathetic pace of ten miles a day. Pinkerton, head of the army’s Secret Service, assured McClellan that he faced at least 200,000 well-armed rebels, and McClellan imagined that horrid horde waiting to ambush him like Apaches falling on an army supply train. The White House urged McClellan on while the War Department sent him contrary dispatches declaring that the further he went from the capital the more likely it was that the rebels would swarm over the river to assault the city. McClellan just inched forward, always ready to spring back if danger threatened.

Colonel Thorne had abandoned his Washington office. He could not stand the oppressive heat in the capital, where the only news from the army was grudging while every rumor of Lee’s apparent ambitions was only too readily reported by the press. Philadelphia was expecting a siege; the city fathers of Baltimore had forbidden the sale of alcohol to protect the nerves of their fearful citizens; while the British Ambassador, a genial aristocrat, was reported to be packing his bags in preparation for a declaration of war against the United States. “All nonsense, Thorne,” Lord Lyons told the colonel at a White House reception. “No point in going to war with you,” he added lightly, “at least not until Bobby Lee’s won the thing for us. We might come in then, of course, to pick up the pieces and get some revenge for Yorktown.”

“It might come to that, Ambassador,” Thorne had answered gloomily.

Lyons, hearing the colonel’s despair, patted his arm. “It won’t, Thorne, and you know it won’t. Not while you’ve got that man.” He nodded across the crowded room at the president of whom Lyons was famously fond. “I admit that some in Britain are not unhappy to see you embarrassed, Thorne,” the ambassador went on, “but I don’t think we wish to risk embarrassment ourselves. Believe me, I’m packing no portmanteaus. Pay a call on us, see for yourself.”