The officers walked away from the creek, leaving the woods there in peace. North of Sharpsburg the armies fought, but in the south they brewed their coffee, read the latest letters from home, slept, and waited.

The third Union attack was not centered on the cornfield, but rather drove down the turnpike toward the West Woods. Starbuck could see its progress by the thick cloud of smoke churned up by the rebel shells that tore into the leading blue ranks, then by the ripping sound of rifle fire exploding from the northern edge of the West Woods. The sound of the battle rose to a frenzy that matched the two previous fights at the cornfield’s edge, but for the moment this was someone else’s fight and Starbuck rested. His eyes were smarting and his throat, despite the mouthfuls of water he had gulped down, was still dry, but his pouch was half full of cartridges again; some were gleaned from the dead and the others from the brigade’s last reserves that had been fetched up from the graveyard. The Yankee gunners had manned the cannon in the cornfield again, but its canister was being soaked up by the makeshift barricades of the dead, who protected the living riflemen in the gray line. The worst threat to his men came from the big federal guns on the Antietam’s far banks, but those gunners were concentrating the worst of their fire on the rebel batteries that lay close to the Dunker church.

Potter scuttled across to Starbuck and offered him a canteen. “Your man Truslow’s back in the woods.”

“He ain’t my man. His own, maybe. Yankees are gone?”

“They’re still there,” Potter said, jerking his head toward the northern part of the East Woods, “but not those bastards with the Sharps rifles. They’ve gone.” Potter lay down, sharing the corpse that protected Starbuck from the canister. Potter’s ear was crudely bandaged, but blood had seeped through the knotted length of rag to crust on his coat and shirt collars. “You want my men back in the woods?” he asked.

Starbuck glanced toward the woods and was rewarded by a flash of bright blue feathers. “Bluebird,” he said, pointing.

“That ain’t a bluebird. That’s a bunting. Bluebirds have got reddish chests,” Potter said. “So do we stay here?”

“Stay here,” Starbuck said.

“I hear Colonel Maitland is stewed?”

“He ain’t too sprightly,” Starbuck admitted.

“This is my first stone-cold sober battle,” Potter said proudly.

“You’ve still got the whiskey?”

“Safe in its stone bottle, wrapped in two shirts, a piece of canvas, and an unbound copy of Macaulay’s Essays. It isn’t a complete volume. I found it dangling in a Harper’s Ferry privy and the first thirty pages had already been consumed for hygienic purposes.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have found his poetry?” Starbuck asked.

“In a privy? No, I think not. Besides, I already have swathes of Macaulay in my head, or what remains of my head,” Potter said, touching the bloody bandage over his left ear. “‘To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late, And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds.’” Potter shook his head at the appropriateness of the words. “Too good for a privy, Starbuck. My father hung the works of Roman Catholic theologians in our outhouse. It was, he said, the only thing they were fit for, but the insult misfired. I damn nearly converted to popery after reading Newman’s lectures. Father thought I was constipated till he found out what I was doing, and after that we used newspapers like every other Christian, but father always made sure that any verses of scripture were cut out before the sheets were threaded on the string.”