'What? Who?' Starbuck had not been listening. Instead he had been searching the smoke-smeared enemy line for any sign of a man giving commands.
'These fellows.' Davies indicated the nearest Yankees with a jerk of his chin. 'They're from Indiana.' 'How do you know?'
'I asked them, of course. Shouted at them.' He fired, flinching from the painful impact of the rifle's heavy recoil against his bruised shoulder. 'I almost married a girl from Indiana once,' Davies added as he dropped the rifle's butt onto the ground and pulled out a paper-wrapped cartridge.
'What stopped you?' Starbuck was priming his revolver with percussion caps.
'She was Catholic and my parents disapproved.' Davies spoke mildly. He bit off a bullet, poured the gritty powder down the hot barrel, then spat the bullet into the muzzle with powder-blackened lips. His spectacles were smeared into opaqueness with dust and sweat. 'I often think of her,' he said wistfully, then rammed the bullet down hard, swung the rifle up, capped it, and pulled the trigger. 'She came from Terre Haute. Don't you think that's a wonderful name for a town?'
Starbuck cocked his revolver. 'How did a Virginian happen to meet a Catholic girl from Terre Haute?' He had to shout the question over the splintering noise of gunfire.
'She's some kind of distant cousin. I met her when she came to Faulconer Court House for a family funeral.' Davies cursed, not because of the memory of his lost love, but because the cone of his rifle had become brittle from the heat and shattered. He threw the gun down and took another from a dead man. Somewhere in the battle smoke a young man screamed horribly. The scream went on and on, punctuated by short gasps of breath. Davies shuddered at the awful sound. 'Oh, my God,' he said callously when the screaming ended suddenly, 'just lay me down.'
'I wish people would stop saying that,' Starbuck said, 'it's getting on my nerves.'
'You'd prefer biblical quotes?' Davies asked. 'Lambs to the slaughter,' he offered, misquoting Isaiah.
''The sword of the Lord is filled with blood.'' Starbuck offered another quotation from the same prophet as he fired two rounds of the revolver. ' 'It is made fat with fatness and with the blood of lambs.''
Davies shuddered at the sentiment. 'I keep forgetting you were a theology student.'
'There's nothing like a course of Old Testament studies to make a soldier ready for battle,' Starbuck said with relish. He lowered his revolver and listened to the sound of the fighting. The Yankee fire was definitely slackening. 'They won't last long now,' he said. His mouth was so dry that talking was difficult. He had replaced his shattered canteen with another but had long drained its tepid contents. Now he stooped and unlooped a dead man's canteen.
'Her name was Louisa,' Davies said.
'Who?' Starbuck said. He tipped the canteen to his mouth and was rewarded by a trickle of lukewarm water. 'Who?' he asked again.
'My distant Catholic relative from Indiana,' Davies said as he primed his new rifle, 'and two years ago she married a corn chandler.'
'With any luck you're about to kill the bastard,' Starbuck said, 'and that'll make the lovely Louisa into a respectable young widow and you can marry her when the war's over.' He emptied the rest of his revolver's chambers into the smoke. 'Keep firing!' he shouted at the company, then slapped Davies on the shoulder as he left the company to walk back along the Legion's rear. 'Bastards are giving way, boys! Keep firing! Keep firing!' He reloaded his revolver as he walked, doing the job without needing to look down at the weapon. Starbuck remembered his first day of battle, not a mile or two from this very spot, when he had been unable to load his revolver because his hands had been trembling and his vision blurred, while now he did it without thinking or looking.
The Legion kept firing but were taking very little return fire except for an occasional shell lobbed by the small howitzers at the edge of the trees, and those shells were mostly fused too long and so exploded harmlessly among the shattered saplings behind the battle line. The Yankee line, splintered into groups by the steady rebel firing, was stumbling back across their own dead toward the railbed. There was a danger they might go to ground there, and Starbuck reckoned his dazed and bloodied men would have to charge with fixed bayonets to keep the Northern retreat moving, but just a second before he shouted the order, so a great backwash of attackers surged from the west.
The Northerners who had passed clean through the rebel line into the open land beyond were now streaming back. They had been harried by Haxall's Arkansas battalion, then intercepted by a brigade sent by Lee to reinforce Jackson's hard-pressed men, and now the Northerners were in full retreat. 'Let 'em through?' Hudson shouted at Starbuck. The choice was either to open ranks and let the Northerners go back beyond the railbed or else to turn and fight, but Hudson's implied choice was to give the enemy a free pass home. There were simply too many Yankees for the battle-weary rebel line to take on, especially as there were still plenty of Northerners firing from the railbed. A decision to fight would have meant firing both east and west, so Starbuck gratefully shouted his assent to Hudson and then pulled the Legion's right wing clear of the retreating Yankees. The fleeing enemy surged past the spoil pit.
Starbuck watched the disorganized enemy run past; then another flicker of movement closer to the hill made him look right to see a small group of gray-clad men running parallel with the enemy but keeping well away from danger. Major Medlicott and Captain Moxey were in the lead of a score of men who now tried to rejoin the Legion's ranks without their arrival being noted. Starbuck ran toward the fugitives. 'Where were you?' he asked Medlicott.
'What do you mean?' Medlicott demanded. He turned away from Starbuck and aimed his rifle at the Yankees running past fifty paces away.
Starbuck slapped the rifle down. 'Where were you?' 'The Yankees pushed us back,' Medlicott said, his tone daring Starbuck to contradict him. 'We tried to rejoin.'
Starbuck knew the man was lying. He could see from the state of Medlicott's soldiers that none of them had been fighting. Their eyes were not reddened by smoke, their lips were not blackened by powder, and their faces did not have the feral, half-scared, half-savage look of men pushed to the edge of endurance. All still wore the red crescent badge denoting their loyalty to Washington Faulconer, and all of them, Starbuck was sure, had skulked for the best part of the day. Yet he could prove nothing, and so he settled for a feeble acceptance of Medlicott's lie. 'Keep fighting,' he said. He knew he had handled the confrontation badly, a suspicion confirmed when Moxey laughed aloud. The laughter was drowned by a sudden ear-hurting roar as a flight of shells crashed into the killing patch beyond the railbed. The rebel artillery, which had been preoccupied these last long minutes with Yankee attackers further south, had switched their fire back to the ground opposite Swynyard's brigade, and the effect of the shrieking, bursting, smoke-riven shells was to drive the enemy's howitzers away from the tree line and the retreating Yankees into the shelter of the railbed cutting.
'You've got to get them out of there, Starbuck!' Swynyard immediately shouted from the hillside.
The Yankees had suddenly learned the value of the railbed and were using its protection to start a galling rifle fire on the Legion. The men returned the fire, but the rebels were getting by far the worst of it. Starbuck, still standing beside the recalcitrant right-hand companies, cupped his hands. 'Fix bayonets!' He watched as his men crouched behind the thin cover of the fire-blasted saplings and slotted long blades onto the black, hot muzzles of their rifles. He turned and saw Moxey's resentful men doing the same. Moxey was wearing one of the frilled shirts he had looted at Manassas Junction, and somehow the finery made Starbuck hate the man even more. He pushed that hatred out of his mind as he capped the five chambers of his new Adams revolver. 'Ready?' he called to Medlicott's men. One or two nodded, but most ignored him. He looked to his left and saw the strained, anxious faces of the other companies. 'Charge!' he shouted. 'Charge!'
The Legion rose from its crouch like men snapping from nightmare. The Yankees in the railbed responded with a volley that billowed smoke along the lip of their makeshift parapet. A shell cracked overhead to make an instant black cloud. Men were falling, bleeding, calling in pain, but most of the Legion were still running through the blackened scrub and reeking smoke. They screamed their war scream. The smoke of the Yankee volley cleared, and the Northerners, armed now with unloaded rifles, saw a glitter of bayonets fast approaching, and so they scrambled hurriedly out the railbed's far side.
Just as a salvo of rebel-fired shells crashed into the dirt and exploded shrapnel into their faces. Most of the Northerners instinctively shied away from that high-explosive death just as the rebel line leaped into the trench.
