Astonishingly, the frail rebel line rose from among the dead. The Yankees, taken by surprise, seemed to pause in sheer disbelief. It was their turn to see the dead come to savage life. “Come on!” Truslow shouted. He was limping, but nothing would stop him.

“Bayonets!” Starbuck shouted.

It seemed a terrible madness had cloaked the rebel line. It was on the verge of rout, but, spurred by the Louisiana Tigers, it charged forward instead of running back. Men were screaming the rebel yell as they ran. The Yankees in the cornfield offered one scattered volley, then began to retreat. Some, unwilling to abandon their victory, shouted at their comrades to stay in the cornfield and those men formed small groups to resist the broken rebel charge.

The rebel yell was the song of those men’s deaths. For a few brief seconds the two sides clashed in the corn. Bayonets parried bayonets, but the rebels outnumbered the Northerners who had stayed to fight. Starbuck, unaware that he was screaming like a maniac, banged a rifle and bayonet to one side, then lunged his own blade into a face. He kicked the man as he fell, reversed his rifle, and hammered the bullet-splintered stock down into the bloody face.

A volley sounded. The Yankees had reformed north of the cornfield and were pouring volley fire at the Louisianians. More fire came from the woods on either side of the cornfield. There were Yankees in both.

“Back! Back!” someone shouted, and the rebels ran back through the cornfield to their old position. Starbuck paused long enough to loot the cartridges from the man he had wounded, then ran after his men. Bullets whipsawed from either side. He was aware of bodies everywhere: sprawling, broken, explosive-torn, mangled, dismembered bodies—white bones and brain, blue intestines, sheets of blood. Some men lay on their own, but most were in groups where they had been cut down by canister and some, horrifically, moved slowly beneath their carapaces of fly-crawling blood. A man moaned, another called on God, a third coughed feebly. Starbuck crouched as he ran, then at last he was out of the cornfield and back in the rebel line. Potter had been wounded. A bayonet had slashed off half his left ear, which now dangled amid a blood-soaked hank of hair. “Just a scratch,” he insisted, “just a scratch. The whiskey’s safe.”

The rebel line lay down again. Men shared canteens and doled out cartridges they found in dead men’s pouches. The Yankees had regrouped, but they seemed unwilling to go back into the cornfield that had become a slaughteryard for both sides. Instead they crouched while the rebel canister whipped the air overhead and their own guns returned the fire. The lone gun on the slight knoll in the field had been abandoned, but there were other Yankee guns close behind it and those guns were firing away. Starbuck aimed at one of the gunners, then decided to save his ammunition.

He stood. The blood in the small of his back had crusted his shirt and now that crust pulled painfully away to wash a gush of warm liquid down his buttocks. His throat was parched, his eyes raw with smoke, and his bones aching with weariness. He found the Irishman who had been telling his beads before the battle and sent him back to the springhouse with a dozen canteens. “Go easy now,” he told him. “Give the trees a wide berth.” The Yankee sharpshooters were back at the edge of the East Woods, though the smoke that lingered in the windless air was spoiling their aim, and their fire, which would have been terrifying in another circumstance, seemed puny after the tempest of rifle fire that had preceded the Louisianian charge.