Potter smiled. “Has anyone determined whether Christians survive battle in greater numbers than unbelievers? I should like to know. Hell, if getting saved is my ticket to survival then you can lead me to the mercy seat right now.”

“It ain’t living or dying,” Starbuck said, trying to ignore the burning pain in his leg muscles and the ache of the boils on his back and the harsh taste of the dust in his throat. “It’s what happens after death.”

“That’s hardly a reason to be converted,” Potter said. “I spent enough time in my father’s church not to want to spend eternity with the same people.” He shuddered. “Good people, yes, but oh so disapproving! I think I’ll take my chances at the other destination.” He laughed, then checked his amusement as a rumbling noise bruised the sky. “They’ve begun proceedings without us?” he suggested chidingly.

“That’s not gunfire,” Starbuck said, “just thunder. Summer thunder.” There were clouds in the east and maybe by evening there would be a hard rain that might break the sweltering humidity that was making the march so hard.

A half hour later they turned and forded the Potomac River. A strong battery of Confederate artillery guarded the ford’s Virginia bank, evidence that this was Lee’s only way of escape if disaster struck the Confederate army. The water came up to their waists so that men had to hoist their cartridge pouches and cap boxes clear of the stream. Once on the far bank, in Yankee territory at last, they crossed the bridge over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and began walking toward a small village just four miles eastward. “Sharpsburg,” Swynyard told Starbuck, “and this,” he gestured at the road up which they trudged, “is our only line of retreat. If the Yankees whip us, Nate, we’ll be running for our lives down this road and if they cut us off from the ford we’ll be done for.”

“They won’t whip us,” Starbuck said grimly. Rebel encampments stretched untidily on either side of the road; evidence that the column was at last nearing its destination. This was the army’s rear area, the place where the transport wagons and artillery parks were sited, the place where the field hospitals readied their scalpels and probes and bandages. The village of Sharpsburg itself was a small grid of neat frame houses with whitewashed porches and carefully watered yards that had been stripped bare of vegetables and fruit. Some civilians put out barrels of water for the marching column, but claimed they had no food to give. “We’re starving ourselves, boys,” a pregnant woman explained.

“Get your victuals off the Yankees, lads,” an old man, evidently a Southern supporter, shouted, “and God bless you!”

They turned left off the village’s main street onto the Hagerstown Pike, which climbed steeply toward the higher ground. A staff officer galloped down the column, found Swynyard, and directed him northward along the pike that ran straight between fields rich with clover. They passed the Dunker church, taking it for a roadside cottage, and there they turned right onto the Smoketown Road and walked the last half mile to reach a shady wood of tall elms and heavy oak. The wood stretched to the north, while south of the road was a plowed field newly sewn with winter wheat. A family’s graveyard was set in the field’s center, and it was there that Swynyard established his headquarters. His brigade, thinned by straggling and worn out by a summer’s campaigning, collapsed in the plowed field and in two fields of stubble that lay to the east. The ground here fell gently away toward the creek and Starbuck, throwing down his bedroll in the shade of the trees just across the road from the plowed field, could see Yankee guns on distant pastures across the river.