“Who cares? Kill ’em anyway.” The gunner laughed, reveling in the wealth of targets that the lifting mist had revealed. There were federal earthworks on the edge of the town and naked batteries waiting to be shelled. The two rivers were edged by a sprawl of industrial buildings that had once been the federal arsenal and a rifle factory but which were now nothing but scorched roofless walls, while the massive bridge that had once carried the Ohio and Baltimore’s rails over the Potomac had been reduced to a series of stone piers like the stepping stones of a giant. The only passage across the wide Potomac now was a pontoon bridge erected by Northern engineers, but as Starbuck watched a great fountain of water exploded out of the river beside the bridge, making the pontoons tug on their chains. A few seconds later there came the sound of the rebel gun that had fired the shell from the distant hills.

Jackson looked startled, for he had not yet ordered his signalers to wigwag the order to begin the bombardment, but someone in the rebel lines on the north side of the Potomac had tired of waiting and suddenly all the guns on all the hills about the town crashed back on their trails and pumped smoke and shells toward the trapped garrison. The watching infantry cheered as the wispy smoke trails of the shells’ burning fuses arced down to the battered town where the Yankees waited.

And where they now died. The rebel gunners worked like fiends to sponge out, reload, and ram their guns, and shell after shell screamed down the slopes to explode in gusting swathes of smoke, flame, and dirt. The Yankee earthworks outside the town seemed to disappear in blasts of smoke, and when the smoke drifted clear the watching rebels could see their enemies running back toward the town’s war-scarred buildings. A few Yankee guns tried to answer the destructive barrage, but the Northern batteries were swiftly battered into silence by the rebel artillery. To the watchers on the hills it seemed as though the river town was being turned into a pit of hell. Flames leaped up from burning limbers, smoke drifted thick, and huge trees shivered like saplings as the shells blasted the leaves away. Sweat poured down the gunners’ faces and bare chests. Each recoil slammed the guns violently back so that their trails gouged deep troughs in the dirt. The wet sponges that extinguished any trace of red-hot explosive remaining in a barrel after each shot hissed and steamed as they were rammed down to the breach, then, the second that the sponge was withdrawn to be thrust into a bucket of dirty water, the loader would shove the next round into the muzzle to be rammed hard down while the rest of the team maneuvered the gun back to its proper aim. “Ready!” the gunner would shout and the team would duck aside with hands over their ears as the command to fire was shouted. The gunner yanked the lanyard that scraped the friction primer over its incendiary tube and a heartbeat later the gun would crash back behind its billow of smoke and another shell, its fuse smoking, screamed toward the town.