“Peel!” Starbuck shouted. “Get these men back!” He would use men from the two right-hand companies to take the casualties back to the graveyard. “Make certain your men come back here!” he called to Peel, then he cupped his hands and shouted at the two left-hand companies to kneel again. The corn was thrashing and whipping, and patches of it were being slung high into the mist that looked thicker to the north, but that thickness was just gunsmoke clogging the air. More canister slapped and slashed the corn, the bullets whistling as they ricocheted on overhead. The surviving rebel skirmishers were retreating. One man crawled on bloody hands through the stalks, another limped, a third collapsed at the field’s edge. Still more canister poured into the bloody field, the worst of the fire going into the center, and so sparing Starbuck’s companies the full force of the cannonade. Two rebel howitzers were lobbing shells over the corn, trying to find the enemy batteries while the rebel cannon on the western hill scorched shells down into the pasture where the Yankees advanced. It was still an artillery fight, a complicated mesh of trajectories under which the infantry moved forward to death.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the Yankee canister ended.

The corn was still. The day almost seemed silent. Scores of guns were firing, and men were shouting, but it seemed silent. The corn stood thick in patches and lay crushed in swathes. Small flames flickered among the fallen stalks where the wadding from the skirmishers’ rifles had started fires. And, at last, there were flags visible above the standing corn. Tall flags hanging limp from staffs that bobbed up and down as the color bearers marched through the cornfield.

Some of Starbuck’s men aimed their rifles. “Wait!” he called. “Wait!”

The Yankees were at last visible through the remnants of standing corn.

They were a dark line in the cornfield’s mist. They were a horde of men advancing beneath their brilliant flags. They were death in blue. There were thousands of them, a mass of men, a drum-driven multitude with bayonets on their rifles.

“Two brigades, I’d guess,” Swynyard said calmly.

“Wait!” Starbuck called to his men again. The Yankee attack was wide enough to overlap the cornfield, which meant that the eastern end of the blue line was now in the woods. “Tumlin!” he shouted.

“Starbuck?” Tumlin appeared at the wood’s edge. The trees above him had been made ragged by Yankee shells that had stripped some branches of leaves and ripped other branches away.

“Take Dennison’s company and support Potter!” Starbuck shouted. “The sons of bitches are coming through the trees!” Tumlin ducked out of sight without acknowledging the order and Starbuck knew he should go and make certain Dennison’s company did move up through the wood, but the sight of the Yankees coming through the shattered cornfield was holding him rooted to the pastureland. The nervousness had ebbed, displaced by the need to hold his men taut.