“I will.”

“Dorcas Bridges,” the man said, “Dearborn Street in Mobile. Tell her I never did stop loving her. You going to write that down, sir?”

“You’re going to be all right,” Delaney tried to reassure the man.

“I’m going to be just fine, sir. Before this day’s through, sir, I’ll be with my Lord and Savior, but Dorcas now, she’s got to manage without me. You will write to her, sir?”

“I’ll write.” Delaney had a stub of pencil and carefully wrote Dorcas’s address on a scrap of newspaper.

Delaney collected a dozen other names and addresses and promised to write to them all. He would write, too, and he would say the same thing in each letter, that their husbands or sons had died bravely and without pain. The truth was that they had all died in horrid pain. The lucky lost consciousness, but the unlucky felt the agony of their wounds right till the last. At the rear of the house, where an herb garden grew, a pile of amputated arms and legs grew higher. A small child watched the pile with wide eyes, thumb in her mouth.

While on the high ground the guns went on and on.

Starbuck found the remnants of Potter’s company still miraculously clinging together. They were close to Rothwell’s body, lining the edge of the East Woods and firing toward the Yankees who marched south. A tatterdemalion mix of men were in the rebel line. There were Georgians, Texans, Virginians, Alabamians, and nearly all had lost touch with their officers, but were simply joining the nearest rebel line and fighting on. The noise in the wood was deafening. The Yankees had brought up new guns that were banging case shot into the trees, there were Northern skirmishers behind the limestone outcrops in the plowed fields, and all the while the fight in the cornfield was swelling into its old fury.

The Yankees were advancing in a column of companies, making themselves a tempting target for the rebel riflemen. “I wish we had cannon,” Potter shouted to Starbuck, then pulled his trigger. Truslow fired steadily and grimly, each bullet thumping into the mass of blue uniforms that kept coming forward, though the closer the attack came to the trees, the more chaos was ripped into its leading ranks. Colonel Maitland had come into the woods, where he was swinging his sword and shouting drunkenly to kill the swine. Swynyard came running south through the wood and knelt beside Starbuck at the edge of the trees. He waited till Starbuck had fired. “They’re in the woods again,” Swynyard shouted, pointing north.

“How many?”

“Thousands!”

“Shit,” Starbuck said, then poured powder into his barrel, spat in the bullet, picked up his ramrod, and shoved it down hard. His right arm was tired and his right shoulder one agonizing bruise from the gun’s recoil. “Who’s holding them?” he asked Swynyard.

“No one.”

“Jesus,” Starbuck swore again. He waited for the smoke to clear and suddenly, right in front of him, he saw a Yankee officer on horseback. The man was white-bearded, his uniform was heavy with braid, and he was shouting desperately at the milling Northerners who were recoiling from the fire from the woods. Starbuck wondered if the man was a general, then aimed at the inviting target. At least a dozen other rebels had seen the man and there was a small fusillade of shots, and when the rifles’ smoke had thinned, there was only a riderless horse.