“Why?” Starbuck asked. “She’s got what she wanted, ain’t she? Got a husband, got away from home.”

“She got me, Major, she got me. Life’s short straw.” Potter shrugged. Much of the lieutenant’s charm, Starbuck had discovered, lay in just such frank admissions of unworthiness. His good looks and bad ways attracted women’s compassion like moths to a candle flame, and Starbuck had watched, amazed, as both Sally and Julia had made a fuss over him. But it was not just women who tried to protect Potter, even men seemed taken by him. The Special Battalion was united in little except resentment, but they had combined in an extraordinary surge of protective affection for Matthew Potter. They were amused by his fallibility, envious, even, of a man who could spend three days drunk, and they had made the Georgian the battalion’s unofficial mascot. Starbuck had thought the Lieutenant would prove a liability, but so far he was the best thing that had happened to the despised Yellowlegs, because Potter entertained by simply existing.

But they would need more than one charming rogue to unite them. Starbuck had done his best in the two days before this journey began. He had persuaded Colonel Holborrow to produce boots, ammunition, canteens, and even the battalion’s arrears of pay. He had marched the men up and down the Brook Turnpike and had rewarded them with cider from Broome’s Tavern after one particularly grueling march, though he doubted that either the reward or the experience would matter much when they joined Jackson’s hard-marching troops. He had made them load their antiquated muskets with buck and ball, an antiquated charge of shot that fired a musket ball with a scatter of buckshot, then he had purloined two dozen of Camp Lee’s shabbiest tents to use as a target. The first volley had riddled the tents’ ridges with holes but left the lower canvas almost unmarked, and Starbuck had made the men inspect the tents. “The Yankees don’t stand high as a ridge,” he had told them. “You’re shooting high. Aim at their balls, even their knees, but aim low.” They had fired a second volley and this one had ripped the worn canvas at the right height. He could spare no more ammunition for such target practice, but just hoped the Yellowlegs remembered the lesson when the men in blue were advancing.

He had talked to the men, not telling them that they were being given a second chance, but saying instead that they were needed up north. “What happened to you at Malvern Hill,” he said, “could have happened to anyone. Hell, it almost happened to me at the first battle.” At Malvern Hill, he had learned, part of the battalion broke and ran after a Yankee shell had struck plumb on their Colonel’s horse while he was leading them forward. The horse had been torn into bloody shreds that had blown back into the faces of the center companies, and that shock introduction to war had been enough to scare a handful of men into full retreat. The others, thinking they were being ambushed, followed. They were not the first battalion to inexplicably break into flight, but it was their misfortune to do it a long way from where the real fighting was going on and to do it in full view of a score of other battalions. The shame clung to them still and Starbuck knew that only battle could wash it away. “The time will come,” he told the battalion, “when men will be proud to say they were a Yellowleg.”