General Jackson raged up and down the wood shouting at men to form in company, to find their battalions, to turn and fight. He knew this was the moment for the Yankees to strike. If one Northern corps, even one brigade, should reinforce the Pennsylvanian lodgment about the Dunker church and carry the attack straight on through the woods, then the dizzied men in gray would break. The Yankees would win the day, the rebel army would be turned into a rabble fleeing for a narrow ford, and by winter the streets of Richmond would be filled with strutting Yankees. General Lee, recognizing the same danger, was assembling a line of guns on a ridge to the west of the woods so that if the triumphant Yankees did burst through the trees, they would be met by a killing barrage that might at least slow the pursuers and give his men time to make a fighting retreat toward the Potomac.

But the Yankees were as dazed as the rebels. The swiftness of the Northern advance had left their units scattered across the field. All of the ground that lay east of the Hagerstown Pike and north of the Dunker church was in Yankee hands, and some Northern units had crossed the Pike to find a dangerous shelter in the edge of the West Woods, but the reinforcements they needed were nowhere in sight. Rebel guns in the south of the battlefield were thrashing the beaten ground with shellfire and rebel infantry was firing from the woods, and so the pursuit stalled as the Yankees, like the rebels, tried to pull order out of chaos.

The rebel panic in the West Woods subsided. Men counted their cartridges and some glanced nervously behind in an effort to spot a route away from the carnage, but as the Northern firing died away the rebels began to reform. One by one the companies were remade, the gaps in the line were mended, and the cartridges replenished.

“I borrowed poor Haxall’s watch.” Colonel Swynyard joined Starbuck. “He won’t need it in heaven, poor man, but I’ll send it to his wife.”

“He’s dead?” Starbuck asked.

Swynyard nodded, then shook the watch and held it to his ear. “It seems to be working,” he said dubiously, then looked at the watch’s face. “Almost nine o’clock,” Swynyard said, and Starbuck immediately frowned and wondered why it was not getting dark. “In the morning, Nate,” Swynyard said gently, “in the morning.”

The day was still young.

Yankees walked through the East Woods and out into the cornfield. One man vomited at the sight of the field. The stench of the place was worse than a slaughterhouse. Men lay shattered, their blood spilled wide, their bowels open in death. Sightless eyes gazed through smoke, mouths were open and filled with flies. Rebel and Yankee lay together. The wounded called for help, some wept, some called for a merciful shot to the head. A few, pitifully few, stretcher bearers had begun work. A chaplain, overcome by the horror, fell to his knees at the edge of the trees and let tears fall onto an open Bible. Other men moved among the horror in search of plunder; they carried pliers to take gold-capped teeth and knives to cut off wedding ring fingers or else to quiet their victims’ protests. A battery of guns checked at the cornfield’s edge, the team’s drivers unwilling to run their heavy weapons over the field corpses, but an officer shouted at them to damn their squeamishness and so they cracked their whips and forced the guns across the bodies. Blood turned black. Stream came from the deeper blood pools. The sun was climbing, the very last mist had gone from the creek, and the day’s sweltering heat was rising.