“Virginia.”

“That’s her name,” the gunner said, “Virginia Simmons.”

Starbuck crouched beside the man. “She is pretty,” he said. The photograph showed a slender, fair-haired girl with an anxious face. “And I reckon you’ll see her again,” he added.

“Not this side of the pearly gates,” the gunner said. He had grown a wispy brown beard in an evident attempt to make himself look older. He glanced at the revolver in Starbuck’s hand, then up into Starbuck’s eyes. “You an officer?”

“Yes.”

“You reckon there’s a heaven?”

Starbuck paused, struck by the intensity of the question. “Yes,” he said gently, “I know there is.”

“Me, too,” the gunner said.

“‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’” Starbuck quoted.

The gunner nodded, then looked back at his wife. “And I’ll be waiting for you, girl,” he said, “with coffee on the boil.” He smiled. “She always likes her coffee scalding hot.” A tear showed in his eye. “Never knew you boys were there,” he said in a weaker voice.

Some of the rebels had pursued the broken Yankees out into the pastureland, but a barrage of canister drove them back. One musket ball struck the barrel of the captured cannon and Starbuck ordered his men back to the trees. He stooped to the wounded gunner to see if the man wanted to be carried back, but the man was already dead. His lap was puddled with blood, his eyes were wide open, and a fly was crawling into his mouth. Starbuck left him.

Back at the tree line some of his men put their heads on their arms and slept. Others stared sightlessly east where the gunsmoke lay like a sea-fog, while in the corn, the pastures, and the ravaged woods, the wounded cried on unheeded.

The heat of the battle had moved south, leaving the scene of the morning’s fighting full of exhausted survivors too weak to fight more. Now it was the sunken road that acted like a giant meat grinder. Battalion after battalion walked into the rebel fire, and battalion after battalion died on the open ground, and still more men came from the east to add their deaths to the day’s rich toll.

But the rebels were dying as well. The road might be a defender’s dream, but it had one shortcoming. It ran directly eastward from the Hagerstown Pike, then bent sharply south and east so that once the Yankees had managed to place a battery on a line directly east of the road’s first stretch, they were able to enfilade the stubborn Confederate defenders. Shells plunged into the sunken road and the steep banks magnified the carnage of each explosion. The fire of the defenders grew weaker, yet still they drove back one attack after another. The Irishmen of New York nearly broke through. They had been told that the Confederates were the friends of the British and that was incentive enough to drive the green flags forward. The flags had golden Irish harps embroidered on the green and the Irishmen carried the harps further forward than any flag had yet reached, but there was no bravery sufficient to carry men through the last few murderous yards of fire. One black-bearded giant of a man screamed his war cry in Gaelic and urged his compatriots on as though he could win the war and avenge his people single-handed, but a rebel’s bullet put the man down, and the charge, like so many others, was finally shredded into raw and bloody tatters by the remorseless rifle fire. The Irish made a new line of bodies, closer than any others to the lane’s fiery lip, while in the lane itself, where the shells plunged to tear dead bodies into mincemeat, the rebel dead thickened.