Dennison nodded. “You’re firing too?” he asked, needing reassurance.

“Head shot,” Case said. “You go for the body.” He patted the middle of Dennison’s back to show where the nervous Captain should aim. “One of us will get the bastard. Now wait.” Case had not been fooled by Starbuck’s offer of leniency. He guessed that the Yankee bastard was scared of him and had tried to buy Case off by returning his stripes, but Robert Case was not a man to let a grudge be settled cheaply. Starbuck had humiliated him, and Case wanted his revenge. He also wanted the commission. In a month, he reckoned, he could be commander of the Yellowlegs and then, by God, he would whip the bastards into a disciplined unit. Maybe he could change their name, call them the Virginia Fusiliers, then have the bastards march into battle like they were on Aldershot’s parade ground.

The two men crouched low, both waiting for the odd silence on the battlefield to end.

The first Yankee hammer blow had fallen, and under it the rebel line in the north of the battlefield had crumbled. The second blow now climbed steadily up from the middle part of the creek while the third, concealed in the hollows and trees beyond the Antietam, waited for the order that would launch them across the gently flowing stream to cut the rebels’ retreat.

On the far side of the Potomac, the marching Light Division heard the sudden lull in the gunfire. Sweating men looked nervously at each other and wondered if the silence meant that the battle was already lost. “Keep going!” the staff officers shouted, “keep going!”

They had miles to march yet and a deep, wide river to cross, but they kept on toward the ominous silence and the pyre of smoke that dirtied a sky above a field of dead.

SEVENTY-NINE MEN, SIR,” STARBUCK REPORTED TO Swynyard.

“The Legion’s down to a hundred and four,” Swynyard said bleakly. “Poor Haxall’s men don’t even make a company. The Sixty-fifth is a hundred and two.” He folded the scrap of paper on which the totals had been penciled. “More men will come in,” he said, “some are hiding, some are running.” Swynyard’s Brigade was shrunken small enough to be collected in a half-acre clearing of the West Woods. The Yankees holding the Dunker church were not more than two hundred paces away, but neither side had ammunition to spare and so each was treating the other gingerly. Now and then one of the rebel skirmishers who ringed the Pennsylvanians fired, but return fire was rare.

“God knows how many have died,” Starbuck said bitterly.

“But your men stood and fought, Nate,” Swynyard said, “which is more than the punishment battalion did at Manassas.”

“Some stood and fought, sir,” Starbuck said, thinking of Dennison. He had not seen the captain and did not care if he never saw him again. With any luck, Starbuck thought, Dennison was dead or captured, and so, he hoped, was Tumlin.