So many dead. It seemed impossible; it seemed obscene. They lay stacked on each other like cordwood, and still those who survived fired, fired, determined to hold that bloody ground.

For what? For what? For what? he wondered in some grieving part of his brain, but he heard the order to fire and obeyed. He thought of George, and obeyed. Robbing another mother of her son, another woman of her love.

Taking another life that, like him, only wanted home.

And he thought of Lizzy, pressed against his heart. Lizzy who loved him, despite all. Who waited for him.

He thought of his mother weeping over his brother Joshua, dead at Shiloh.

He couldn’t fire again, could not stop one more heart, drive one more mother to weeping. This was slaughter, he thought. Hundreds dead and hundreds more to die. Farmers and masons and blacksmiths and shopkeepers. Why didn’t they surrender? Why would they fight and die in that depressed earth surrounded by their dead brothers?

Was this honor? Was this duty? Was this the answer? Exhausted, heartbroken, sickened at the carnage below, he lowered his weapon.

He didn’t feel the first shell punch into him, or the second. He only felt suddenly and terribly cold, and found himself once more on the ground, looking up at the sky.

He thought clouds had rolled over the sun. Everything grayed and flattened. And all the noise, all the hell of it dimmed into an almost peaceful quiet.

Was it over? At last, was it over?

He reached a hand inside his uniform for Lizzy, drew her photograph out. Stared, stared as blood smeared over her beautiful face.

Then he knew.

He knew.

Pain came in a sudden, shocking flood as blood streamed out of his wounds. He cried out against it, cried out again in a sorrow too deep to bear.

He would never build her a pretty stone house near the singing creek with honeysuckle growing wild and wild as he’d promised her. They would never fill that house with love, with children.

He had done his duty, and lost his life. He tried to kiss her face one last time, but the photograph fluttered out of his numb fingers.

He accepted his death, he had sworn an oath. But he had sworn one to Lizzy as well. He could not accept that he would never see her again, or touch her.

He murmured her name as the breath and the blood ran out of him.

He thought—his last thought—he heard her call to him. He thought he saw her, her face pale, wet with sweat, her eyes glazed as if with fever. She spoke his name. He spoke hers.

Joseph William Ryder, known as Billy to all who loved him, died on the bend of the road above the sunken ground that came to be known as Bloody Lane.