“Now how could he do that?” Pinkerton asked, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe. “There are eighty thousand rebels across that river, Colonel, and young Custer’s too canny a lad to commit suicide.” The Scotsman laughed.

“Eighty thousand,” McClellan repeated the figure, then pointed to the cloud of dust, “and that dust tells us that more are coming.” He stretched his legs to prop his boots on the strange, fortress-like barricade and, for a time, with his head sunk on his chest, he frowned toward the distant plateau that was edged by the rebel gunline. “By tomorrow, gentlemen,” he announced after a long silence, “we shall doubtless face a hundred thousand enemies, but we shall do our duty. America expects no more of us.”

It does expect more, Thorne thought savagely. America expects victory. It expects its sons to be spared slaughter in the coming years, it expects an undivided Union and to have Washington’s gutters awash in beer while the victory parade marches past, but all McClellan prayed for was survival, and Thorne, appalled at the man’s obduracy, could do nothing more. He had tried, and in the cause for which he pleaded Adam Faulconer had died, but McClellan commanded the army and the battle would be fought in the Young Napoleon’s own good time.

And so the Yankees waited.

Nothing could have prevented straggling. For a time Starbuck had snarled at his limping, bleeding, struggling men, but one by one they dropped back in helpless weakness. The road’s verges were littered with other stragglers who had dropped out of battalions further up the road, while here and there a brave soul hobbled on using his rifle as a crutch and with his feet leaving bloody footprints on the road’s dust.

Starbuck’s battalion at least had boots, but the boots were ill-made and were coming apart at the seams. Their real problem was plain weakness. They were unfit, and the handful of marches they had made in the last few weeks were no preparation for this hot, hard road where Jackson’s staff officers goaded the troops on. Most of the other battalions were suffering from a lack of food. The army had outrun its supplies, and though the men had gorged on the Yankee delicacies captured at Harper’s Ferry, that rich food had only made them ill. Now they were back on a diet of apples and corn snatched from the unharvested fields, and even the men who kept up the grueling pace were plagued by diarrhea. The column pounded on between lines of exhausted, sick men and the ever-present stench of feces.

Colonel Swynyard finally gave up trying to prevent straggling in his brigade. “It’s no good, Nate,” he said, “let them be.” Swynyard was leading his horse. He could have ridden, as Lieutenant Colonel Maitland of the Legion rode, but he preferred to rest his horse’s back and to set an example to his men.

Starbuck grudgingly let the sickest men fall out, but he would not allow any of the officers to leave the column. Billy Blythe was the worst affected. He was sweating in his tight coat and stumbling glassy-eyed, but whenever he veered toward the grass verge Starbuck would shove him onward. “You’re an officer, Billy,” he said, “so set an example.” Blythe viciously spat out the efficacious word, but he was more frightened of Starbuck than of his weakness and so he limped on. “I thought you walked all the way south from Massachusetts,” Starbuck added.