Starbuck crouched among the men of Cartwright’s company and fought as a rifleman. There was nothing else to do. There were no useful commands to shout, no reserves to fetch, nothing to do but fight. The fear that had haunted him for a month was still there, but at bay now, lurking like a beast in the shadows. He was too busy to be aware of it. For him, as for the others who still survived in the rebel line, the battle had become a tiny patch of earth circumscribed by smoke, blood, and burning grass. He had no conception of time, nor of what happened elsewhere. He heard the shells boom overhead and the unending thunder of the guns all around, and he knew that the foul-smelling air all about him was thick with bullets, but all his concentration was now on loading and firing. He picked his targets, watching one group of Yankees trying to work their way down the edge of the East Woods. He would choose one man, watch him, wait till the man checked to load his rifle, then fire. He saw an officer, shot at him, then dropped the rifle butt onto the ground as he pulled a cartridge from the bottom of his pouch. An enemy bullet hit the rifle’s stock, almost snatching it from his grasp and driving great splinters from its butt. He swore, rammed the bullet home, brought the broken stock up to his shoulder, primed the cone, and saw the officer was still alive, still shouting his troops forward, and so he fired again. His shoulder was tender from the rifle’s recoil and his fingernail was bleeding from picking the hot shattered caps from the cone. The rifle’s barrel was almost too hot to touch. The man next to him was dead, shot through one eye, and Starbuck rifled the man’s pouch to find six cartridges.

Truslow was hit in the thigh. He cursed, clapped a hand on the bleeding wound, then scrabbled in his pouch for a tin of moss and spider’s web that he had kept for this moment. He ripped his pant leg apart, gritted his teeth, then stuffed the mixture into the entry and exit wounds. He rammed the moss and web in, suffering the pain, then picked up his rifle and looked for the son of a bitch who had shot at him. Robert Decker was crawling among the dead, rescuing cartridges, which he tossed to the living. Potter was firing and loading, firing and loading, always keeping his front toward the enemy so that no bullet struck the precious bottle of whiskey in his pack.

The Yankee line seemed to thicken rather than thin. More blue-coated troops were coming down the funnel to stiffen the attack, and now a Northern gun team galloped right into the cornfield and slewed about in a shower of dirt and broken stalks to position their cannon on a slight rise of ground that lay at the field’s northern margin. A gun horse went down to a blast of rebel case-shot. It screamed and flailed at the air with its hooves. It thrashed its neck, spraying blood while a gunner cut it out from the rest of the panicking team that he ran back out of rifle range. Another gunner shot the wounded horse, then his companions fired their first shot—a shell that landed plumb in the center of the rebel line. The Yankee gunners were screaming at their own infantry to clear a field of fire so they could load with canister. “We can’t last,” Truslow growled to Starbuck.