and discovered shallow places where they could meet in midstream to exchange newspapers or swap southern tobacco for northern coffee. Now, though, in their eagerness to prove themselves the best soldiers in all the world, the Legion forgot the summer’s friendliness and swore instead to teach the lying, thieving, bastard Yankees to come across the river without first asking for rebel permission.
Captain Hinton reappeared at the edge of the trees and cupped his hands. “A Company, to me!”
“Form on A Company’s left!” Bird shouted to the rest of the Legion. “Color party to me!”
One of the cannon bolts slashed through the trees, showering the advancing men with leaves and splinters. Starbuck could see where an earlier shot had ripped a branch from a trunk, leaving a shocking scar of fresh clean timber. The sight gave him a sudden catch in the throat, a pulse of fear that was the same as excitement.
“Color party to me!” Bird shouted again and the standard-bearers raised their flags into the sunlight and ran to join the Major. The Legion’s own color was based on the Faulconer family’s coat-of-arms and showed three red crescents on a white silken field above the family motto “Forever Ardent.” The second color was the national flag of the Confederacy, two red horizontal stripes either side of a white stripe, while the upper quadrant next to the staff showed a blue field on which was sewn a circle of seven white stars. After Manassas there had been complaints that the flag was too similar to the northern flag and that troops had fired on friendly units believing them to be Yankees, and rumor had it that a new design was being made in Richmond, but for today the Legion would fight beneath the bullet-torn silk of its old Confederate color.
“Dear sweet Jesus save me, dear sweet Jesus save me,” Joseph May, one of Starbuck’s men, prayed breathlessly as he hurried behind Sergeant Truslow. “Save me, O Lord, save me.”
“Save your breath, May!” Truslow growled.
The Legion had been advancing in columns of companies and now it peeled leftward as it turned itself from a column of march into a line of battle. A Company was first into the trees and Starbuck’s K Company would be the last. Adam Faulconer rode with Starbuck. “Get off that horse, Adam!” Starbuck shouted up to his friend. “You’ll be killed!” He needed to shout for the crackle of musketry was loud, but the sound was filling Starbuck with a curious elation. He knew as well as Adam that war was wrong. It was like sin, it was terrible, but just like sin it had a terrible allure. Survive this, Starbuck felt, and a man could take anything that the world might hurl at him. This was a game of unimaginably high stakes, but also a game where privilege conferred no advantages except the chance to avoid the game altogether, and whoever used privilege to avoid this game was no man at all, but a lickspittle coward. Here, where the air was foul with smoke and death whipped among green leaves, existence was simplified to absurdity. Starbuck whooped suddenly, filled with the sheer joy of the moment. Behind him, their rifles loaded, K Company spread among the green leaves. They heard their Captain’s whoop of joy and they heard the rebel yell sounding from the troops on the right, and so they began to make the same demonic wailing screech that spoke of southern rights and southern pride and southern boys come to make a killing.
“Give them hell, boys!” Bird shouted. “Give them hell!”
And the Legion obeyed.
Baker died.
The Senator had been trying to steady his men whose nerves were being abraded by the whooping, vengeful, southern fiends. Baker had made three attempts to break out of the woods, but each northern advance had been beaten bloodily back to leave another tide mark of dead men on the small meadow that lay like a smoke-palled slaughter field between the two forces. Some of Baker’s men were abandoning the fight; hiding themselves on the steep escarpment that dropped down to the riverbank or sheltering blindly behind tree trunks and outcrops of rock on the bluffs summit. Baker and his aides rousted such timid men out from their refuges and sent them back to where the brave still attempted to keep the rebels at bay, but the timid crept back to their shelters just as soon as the officers were gone.
The Senator was bereft of ideas. All his cleverness, his oratory, and his passion had been condensed into a small tight ball of panic-stricken helplessness. Not that he showed any fear. Instead he strolled with drawn sword in front of his men and called on them to aim low and keep their spirits high. “There are reinforcements coming!” he said to the powder-stained men of the 15th Massachusetts. “Not much longer, boys!” he encouraged his own men of the 1st Californian. “Hot work now, lads, but they’ll tire of it first!” he promised the men of New York Tammanys. “If I had one more regiment like you,” he told the Harvards, “we’d all be feasting in Richmond tonight!”
Colonel Lee tried to persuade the Senator to retreat across the river, but Baker seemed not to hear the request and when Lee shouted it, insisting on being heard, Baker merely offered the Colonel a sad smile. “I’m not sure we have enough boats for a retreat, William. I think we must stand and win here, don’t you?” A bullet spat inches above the Senator’s head, but he did not flinch. “They’re only a pack of rebels. We won’t be beaten by such wretches. The world is watching and we have to show our superiority!”
Which was probably what an ancestor of Baker’s had said at Yorktown, Lee reflected, but wisely did not say aloud. The Senator might have been born in England, but there was no more patriotic American. “You’re sending the wounded off?” Lee asked the Senator instead.
“I’m sure we are!” Baker said firmly, though he was sure of no such thing, but he could not worry about the wounded now. Instead he needed to fill his men with a righteous fervor for the beloved union. An aide brought him news that the 19th Massachusetts had arrived on the river’s far bank and he was thinking that if he could just bring that fresh regiment across the Potomac he would have enough men to throw an attack against the knoll from which the rebels were decimating his left flank and preventing his howitzers from doing their slaughtering work. The idea gave the Senator instant hope and fresh enthusiasm. “That’s what we’ll do!” he shouted to one of his aides.
“We’ll do what, sir?”
“Come on! We have work!” The Senator needed to get back to his left flank and the quickest route lay in the open where the gunsmoke offered a fogbank in which to hide. “Come on,” he shouted again, then hurried down the front of his line, calling to the riflemen to hold their fire until he had passed. “We’re being reinforced, boys,” he shouted. “Not long now! Victory’s coming. Hold on there, hold on!”
A group of rebels saw the Senator and his aides hurrying in the shifting smoke, and though they did not know Baker was the northern commander, they knew that only a senior officer would carry a tasseled sword and wear a uniform so tricked out with braid and glitter. A gold watch chain hung with seals was looped on the Senator’s coat and caught the slanting sun. “There’s their gang boss! Gang boss!” a tall, stringy, redheaded Mississippian called aloud, pointing to the striding figure who marched so confidently across the battle’s front. “He’s mine!” the big man shouted as he ran forward. A dozen of his companions scrambled after him in their eagerness to plunder the bodies of the rich northern officers.
“Sir!” one of Baker’s aides called in warning.
The Senator turned, raising his sword. He should have retreated into the trees, but he had not crossed a river to flee a rabble of seceshers. “Come on then, you damn rebel!” he shouted, and he held the sword out as though ready to fight a duel.
But the red-haired man used a revolver and his four bullets thudded into the Senator’s chest like axe blows hitting softwood. The Senator was thrown back, coughing and grasping at his chest. His sword and hat fell as he tried to stay on his feet. Another bullet ripped
