never moved from its position. Truslow had seen to that, barricading the railbed with a fallen tree so that the threatening disaster to the South had been given no chance of spreading as far as his company. There were dead Yankees all along the front of Truslow and Davies's men, but none of the enemy had come closer than fifteen yards from the parapet. 'So what were you doing up there?' Truslow asked calmly.
'Not very well,' Starbuck confessed.
'The Legion's still in place,' Truslow said in a voice so grim that it was a moment or two before Starbuck realized the words were probably meant as a compliment.
'God knows if we can take another attack,' he said.
'Ain't none of God's business,' Truslow said, 'but if the bastards do come again, then we'll just have to drive them off again. Well done!' This rare enthusiastic praise was not directed at Starbuck but at Sergeant Bailey, who had brought replacement ammunition to the railbed. Two other men were tending a fire so that Truslow's company would have boiling water to scour the powder deposits from their rifles.
Starbuck walked back along his defense line. The Yankees had settled at the tree line, from where they were directing a constant and harassing rifle fire at the railbed. Starbuck's men kept their heads down, sometimes raising themselves to fire a shot or sometimes just lifting a rifle over the makeshift parapet and squeezing the trigger blindly. 'Don't waste ammunition!' Starbuck snarled at one man who had thus fired without sighting first. 'If you're going to shoot, aim, and if you're not, keep low.'
There were bodies in the railbed. Some were the Legion's own dead, lying on their backs, mouths open and hands curled. Starbuck recognized a few men with sadness, some without any regret, and a handful with satisfaction. One or two of the rebel dead were strangers. He should have known them, but he had not had time to learn the names and faces of every new conscript. The Yankee dead had mostly been hoisted onto the parapet to help protect the rebel living, while the Legion's white-faced wounded lay breathing shallowly against the rear slope of the cutting.
Starbuck resisted the urge to crouch as the cutting became shallower. An officer was supposed to show his men an example of fearlessness, and Starbuck kept his pace steady even as his mind screamed and his pulse raced with fear. Bullets slapped the air around him for the few seconds that he was exposed to the Yankees; then he was able to jump down into the spoil pit, which was grotesque with enemy dead. The smell of blood was thick, and the first flies already swarming on the bloodied wounds. It was the spoil pit, Starbuck reckoned, that had saved the Legion. The hollow had drawn the attackers away from the rest of the line because of its promise of a safe, covered route into the rebel rear. But once in the pit the Northerners had been trapped, first by the abatis and then by the fire of Haxall's battalion, which Swynyard had brought down from the hill.
'We're thin on the ground, sir,' Lieutenant Patterson greeted Starbuck.
'Thin?'
Patterson shrugged. 'Half A and B companies are missing.'
'Medlicott? Moxey?' Starbuck need not have asked. Both men were absent, and no one knew where they might be. Coffman was safe, crouching under the railbed's shallow parapet with a rifle he had taken from a dead man, and Captain Pine's mountain howitzer was also safe. It had been parked at the back crest of the spoil pit, where it was attracting Yankee bullets.
Patterson saw Starbuck glance at the gun. 'We forgot to bring the ammunition, sir.'
Starbuck swore. Nothing was going right this day, nothing, except, as Truslow had said, the Legion was still in place. Which meant the battle was not lost. And happily, except for the one hapless mountain howitzer, the Yankees had not deployed any artillery against the Legion. The woods were too thick to let the gunners of either side deploy their weapons, though just as that thought occurred to Starbuck, some shells began to explode. They were rebel shells, and they burst in the woods over the Yankees, who, astonished by the shrapnel, crept back from the tree line. The gunfire seemed to be coming from far to the south, but it stopped abruptly as a surge of cheering and rifle fire sounded further down Jackson's line. Starbuck, listening to the sound of battle, guessed he was hearing a Yankee attack like the one the Legion had just, though barely, survived. The gunners had shortened their range to enfilade the attackers, and the Yankees close to the Legion crept back to the tree line to begin their harassing fire again.
Haxall's men had returned to the hill, from where they were now sharpshooting across the railbed, while Hudson's North Carolinians were also back in place. The tall Colonel Hudson saw Starbuck and strode toward him. 'A hot place, Starbuck!' He meant the railbed hard by the spoil pit.
'I'm sorry my fellows ran.'
'My dear man, mine went as well! Scattered like barnyard fowls!' Hudson decently refrained from pointing out that his men had no choice but to run once Medlicott had exposed their flank. 'Have you the time?' the Colonel now asked. 'A Yankee shot my watch, see?' He showed Starbuck the torn pocket where the watch had been stored. 'Bullet went straight through without touching me, but it rather mangled the watch. Pity. It belonged to my grandfather. It kept terrible time, but I was fond of it and hoped to pass it on to my son.'
'You've got a son?' Starbuck asked, somehow surprised by the information.
'Three altogether, and a brace of daughters. Tom's my oldest boy. He's twenty-four now and serves as one of Lee's aides.'
'Lee!' Starbuck was impressed. 'The Lee?'
'Bobby himself. Nice fellow. Still, pity about the watch.' The Colonel picked a piece of shattered watch glass from the remnants of his pocket.
'Coffman!' Starbuck shouted. 'What time is it?'
Coffman had inherited an ancient timepiece from his father, and now he fished its bulbous case from an inner pocket and clicked open the lid. 'It says thirty minutes after four, sir.'
'It must have stopped this morning,' Starbuck said. 'It can't be that late.'
'But look at the sun!' Hudson said, intimating that it truly was that late in the afternoon.
'Then where's Lee?' Starbuck asked. 'I thought he was coming to relieve us.'
'I find it best to plan military affairs on the twin principles that whatever I am told is certain will never occur, and that whatever is proclaimed impossible is disastrously imminent. There is no good news in war,' Hudson pronounced grandly, 'only less bad news. Dear, oh dear.' The mild oath had been caused by a resurgence of enemy rifle fire from the tree line. 'I do believe, my dear Starbuck, that the Republican party claims our attention again. Ah, well, to our toil, to our toil.'
And the storm broke again.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck was trying to understand what was happening. Comprehension, he thought, was not much to ask. War was as rational an activity as any other human endeavor and must, he presumed, yield to analysis, yet whenever he inquired of a general officer what exactly was occurring in the western woods, he received a different answer.
The North was attacking, one general said, yet the general's own men were sprawling in the meadows playing cards and smoking pipes. 'All in good time, all in good time,' the General said when the preacher asked him why his men were not supporting the attack. One of the General's staff officers, a superior young man who made clear his disapproval of a civilian intruding on a battlefield, informed the Reverend Starbuck that Jackson was retreating, the Yankees were pursuing, and that the commotion in the woods was nothing but a noisy rear guard.
Major Galloway also tried to reassure the preacher. Galloway had been ordered to wait until the attacking infantry broke through Jackson's line, after which his men would join the Northern cavalry in their pursuit of the shattered enemy. The Reverend Starbuck waited on horseback for that promised breakthrough and tried to convince himself that the Major's explanation made sense. 'Jackson's attempting to retreat southward, sir,' Galloway told the preacher, 'and our fellows have him pinned against the woods over there,' but even Galloway was unhappy with that analysis. The Major, after all, had failed to find any evidence that Jackson had ever gone to Centreville, so it did not make sense that he would now be retreating from that town, which raised the mystery of what exactly the Southern general was doing. And that mystery was made even more worrying by Billy Blythe's repeated assertions that he had seen a second rebel army marching toward Manassas from the west. Galloway was unwilling to share his anxiety with the Reverend Doctor Starbuck, but the Major had the distinct impression that perhaps General Pope had utterly misunderstood what was truly happening.
Galloway's unhappiness was compounded by the acrid mood that prevailed within his small regiment. Blythe's return had stirred Adam Faulconer's anger, an anger that had come to a head the night before when the Virginian had accused Blythe of murdering civilians at McComb's Tavern. Blythe had denied the accusation. 'We was fired on
