And the battle was scarcely a half hour old.

BILLY BLYTHE RECKONED HE HAD MISCALCULATED. HE HAD only ever seen one battle and that had been fought close to the Bull Run, where the hills were smaller and steeper than this high plateau between the Antietam and the Potomac, and at Manassas there had been far more woods, which had provided easy places for a man to hide while the battle’s tide washed extravagantly past. He had planned on doing just that this day—slipping away in the confusion and finding some deep place in the green trees where no one would find him until the killing was over.

Instead he discovered himself on a high, bare place cut by fences and lanes, and where the only woods were either firmly in rebel hands or else were the scenes of savage fighting. And that meant there was nowhere to hide and nowhere to run, and so Billy Blythe sheltered behind the graveyard’s low stone wall and wondered just how he was ever going to abandon the rebel army and join the Northern troops. He made what preparation he could. For a time he had busied himself among the wounded, though it was no act of mercy that had motivated him, but rather the need to discover a well-bloodied gray coat that he could exchange for his tight jacket. Then, wearing the blood-damp coat so that he looked like one of the wounded himself, he settled down to wait.

“You hurt?” Dennison saw Tumlin lying against the wall.

“Nothing that’ll kill me, Tom,” Blythe answered.

Dennison reloaded the rifle he had borrowed from one of the wounded. Every few moments he would peer over the stone wall’s coping and fire a shot at the Yankee skirmishers who edged the East Woods. He had fled from those woods earlier, driven out by the terrifying fire of the Pennsylvanian rifles and now, with half of his company, he sheltered behind the graveyard wall. The other half of his company was lost. Dennison knew he should not be here, that he should have stayed with Starbuck’s battalion, but he had been drowned by terror in the opening minutes because he had never imagined that battle could be so overwhelmingly violent. At Gaines’s Mill, where the Yellowlegs had earned their derisory nickname, Dennison had never come close to the real battle, but somehow he had imagined that combat would prove to be a more decorous business, something like the prints of the Revolutionary War that hung on his uncle’s walls. In those prints the two opposing lines always stood upright with noble expressions of grim resolve, the dead had the good manners to lie facedown so that their wounds were hidden, while the wounded were relegated to the edges of the pictures where they expired palely and gracefully in the arms of their comrades. That had been Dennison’s expectation, but in the first few shattering moments of this bloody day beside the Antietam he had discovered that the reality of battle was a gut-loosening slaughter in which a man’s wits were banished by noise and where the wounded died with their bellies slit open, their brains splattered on turf, and their voices screaming helplessly as they thrashed in agony. And all the while the noise banged on and on, and the bullets hissed and whistled, and the terrible shells crashed incessantly.