The Yankees were two hundred paces away. They looked fresh, well-clothed, and confident. Starbuck could see their mouths open as they shouted their war cries, but he could hear nothing. He stared at them and he suddenly thought that this was how the makers of America had seen the Redcoats. The rebels then had been just as ragged, and the enemy just as well armed and smartly uniformed, and his fear was abruptly swamped by a fierce desire to shatter this overweening enemy. “Fire!” he shouted, “and kill the bastards!” He screamed the last three words and his two companies opened fire a second before the rest of the rebel line fired to blanket the pasture with rifle smoke. “Kill them!” Starbuck was shouting as he walked up and down behind the line. “Kill them!” He pushed through the files and fired his own rifle, then immediately dropped the butt to the ground to begin reloading. His pulse was racing, the fire was in his veins, the madness of battle was beginning its magic. Perfect hate casts away fear. He rammed the bullet down.

“Fire!” Captain Cartwright encouraged his men. It was a straight infantry fight now. The Yankee gunners were unsighted and so the blue-coated riflemen had to fight and kill and endure the bullets coming back. The rebel guns drenched the attackers in canister, blasting new gaps in the surviving corn. A spray of blood misted the air and somewhere a man screamed terribly until his screams were cut short by the meaty thump of a bullet burying itself in flesh. Starbuck smelled the horrid stink of burned powder, he heard the whistle of a minie bullet whip past his ear, then the rifle was back in his shoulder, and he aimed low into the corn and fired.

The gunsmoke was hanging in the still air like a layer of fog. Some men, in order to see beneath the smoke, lay down to aim. Starbuck ducked and could see Yankee legs among the corn. He fired, then backed out through the files to see how his men were faring.

The Yellowlegs were sticking to the fight. They were ramming their bullets, priming the guns, pulling their triggers, but some were falling. Some were dead. The noise was obliterating sense; it was a deafening sky of fire, a numbing rattle laced with screams. More men fell. Starbuck’s line was thinning, but suddenly Davies’s company from the Legion was pushing into their ranks to add their fire. Davies grinned at Starbuck. “Christ,” he said in awe.

“Fire!” Starbuck shouted. Survival now depended simply on outfiring the enemy. “Captain Peel!” He ran toward the trees to summon the last of his shrinking battalion. “Peel! Bring your men!” Peel’s company still had the old-fashioned Richmond muskets that were loaded with buck and ball and Starbuck reckoned the smoothbore volleys might work a wicked slaughter in this close-range battle. “Into line! Anywhere!” He pushed men helter-skelter into the ranks, no longer caring whether the companies kept their cohesion. “And fire! Fire! Just kill them!” He screamed the words as he emptied his revolver chamber by chamber into the shroud of smoke. “Kill them!”