“Hardtack and half an apple.”

“Give me half of the half.”

He strapped on his belt, then checked that the cartridge pouch was full, the cap box filled, and the revolver loaded. For hundreds of years, he thought, men had woken thus to a day of battle. They had tested their spear points, felt their sword edges, made certain musket flints were tight, then prayed to their gods that they would live. And hundreds of years from now, Starbuck supposed, soldiers would still wake in a gray dark and go through the same motions with whatever unimaginable means of death they carried. He hefted his rifle, checked the percussion cap, then slung it on his shoulder. “To work,” he said to Lucifer. “Earn our pay.”

“What pay?” Lucifer asked.

“I owe you,” Starbuck said.

“So I ain’t a slave?”

“You’re free as a bird, Lucifer. You want to fly away, then you fly. But I’d miss you. But if you stay today,” Starbuck added, knowing full well that Lucifer would stay, “then you keep out of harm’s way. This ain’t your fight.”

“White men only, eh?”

“Fools only, Lucifer. Fools only,” Starbuck said, then walked slowly through the dark wood, feeling his way where the feeble light of reviving fires did not show a path. He talked to waking men, stirred the laggards, and organized a work party to fill the battalion’s canteens. Biting bullets off cartridges filled the mouth with salty gunpowder so that an hour into a fight men were parched and water was worth its weight in gold. He sent another party to bring up spare ammunition from the graveyard so that the battalion could have its own reserve supply at the wood’s edge. It was there, where the wood bordered the road, that he stopped to listen to an unseen band of men who softly sang a hymn among the dark mist-shrouded trees. “‘Jesus, my strength, my hope,’” they sang, “‘On thee I cast my care; With humble confidence look up, And know thou hear’st my prayer.’” The familiar words were strangely comforting, but someone else had also been listening and started to sing another hymn in a voice much louder than those of the men who had gathered for their morning prayers.

“‘Hark how the watchmen cry!’” Captain Potter sang in a remarkably good clear tenor voice, “‘Attend the trumpet’s sound. Stand to your arms, the foe is nigh, The powers of hell surround.’”

Starbuck discovered Potter among the trees. “Let them be,” he chided Potter gently for disturbing the prayers.

“I just thought my choice more appropriate than theirs,” Potter said. He was in a feverishly excited mood, so much so that for an instant Starbuck wondered if the stone bottle of whiskey had been emptied, but there was no smell of liquor on Potter’s breath as, more quietly, he sang the hymn’s last quatrain. “‘By all hell’s host withstood, We all hell’s host o’erthrow, And conquering them through Jesus’ blood, We on to conquer go.’” He laughed. “Funny, isn’t it? The Yankees are probably singing that as well. Both of us clamoring to Jesus. He must be confused.”