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ELEVEN

‘SO YOU’RE OUR DAMNED SPY, are you?’ Colonel Nathan Evans greeted Nathaniel Starbuck who, still mounted on Pocahontas, had his hands tied behind his back and was under the guard of two Louisiana cavalrymen who while scouting the country toward Sudley Church had found and pursued Starbuck, then captured and pinioned him, and now had fetched him back to their commanding officer, who was standing with his brigade staff a short distance behind the stone bridge. ‘Get the bugger off his horse!’ Evans snapped.

Someone took hold of Starbuck’s right arm and pulled him unceremoniously out of the saddle so that the Northerner fell heavily at Evans’s feet. ‘I’m not a spy,’ he managed to say. ‘I’m one of Faulconer’s men.’

‘Faulconer?’ Evans barked a brief, humorless noise that might have been laughter or was maybe a growl. ‘You mean that bastard who thinks he’s too good to fight with my brigade? Faulconer doesn’t have men, boy, he has white-livered fairies. Milksops. Mudsills. Black-assed, shad-bellied, shit-faced, pussy-hearted trash. And you’re one of that scum, are you?’

Starbuck recoiled from the stream of insult, but somehow managed to persevere with his explanation. ‘I found Northern troops in the woods beyond the Sudley Fords. A lot of them, and coming this way. I was on my way back to warn you.’

‘Bastard’s lying like a rug, Colonel,’ one of the two Louisianan cavalrymen interjected. They were whip-lean, rough-bearded horsemen with weather-darkened faces and wild scary eyes, reminding Starbuck of Sergeant Truslow. They were outrageously armed, each man carrying a carbine, two pistols, a saber and a bowie knife. One of the two cavalrymen had a bleeding cut of freshly slaughtered pork hanging from his saddle bow, while the other, who had efficiently relieved Starbuck of his three dollars and sixteen cents, had two unplucked chickens hanging from his crupper strap by their broken necks. That man had also found the letter from Starbuck’s father and his brother’s laissez-passer, but, being illiterate, he had taken no interest in the papers which he had carelessly shoved back into Starbuck’s shirt pocket. ‘He weren’t weaponed,’ the laconic cavalryman continued, ‘and he didn’t have no uniform on him. I reckons he’s a spy, Colonel, sir. Just listen to the sumbitch’s voice. He ain’t no southron.’

A shell thumped into the meadow a dozen paces in front of the small group. It exploded, jarring a seismic thump through the soil and rooting up chunks of red dirt. The sound, even muffled by the earth, was a violent, scary crack that made Starbuck wince with shock. A scrap of stone or metal whistled close to Evans’s shabby brown hat, but the colonel did not even flinch. He just glanced at one of his orderlies who was mounted on a piebald horse. ‘Intact, Otto?’

‘Ja, Colonel, intact.’

Evans looked back to Starbuck, who had struggled to his feet. ‘So where did you see these Federal troops?’

‘Maybe a half mile beyond the Sudley Fords, sir, on a road that leads east.’

‘In the woods, you say?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Evans picked with an opened penknife at his teeth, which were dark and rotten from chewing tobacco. His skeptical eyes looked up and down Starbuck, and did not seem to like what they saw. ‘So how many Federal troops did you see, cuffee?’

‘I don’t know, sir. A lot. And they’ve got cannon with them.’

‘Cannon, eh? I am frightened! Shitting in my pants, I am.’ Evans sniggered and the men around him laughed. The colonel was famous for the filth of his language, the depth of his thirst and the ferocity of his temper. He had graduated from West Point in 1848, though barely, and now ridiculed the academy’s curriculum by claiming that what made a soldier was the talent to fight like a wildcat, not some prinking ability to speak French or to solve fancy problems in trigonometry or to master the complexities of natural philosophy, whatever the hell that was. ‘You saw the cannon, did you?’ he now demanded fiercely.

‘Yes, sir.’ In truth Starbuck had seen no Northern guns, but he had watched the Federal troops dismantling the barricade and he reasoned they would surely not waste their time clearing the road for infantry. An infantry column could have skirted the felled trees, but guns would need an unobstructed passage, which surely suggested that the concealed flank attack was bringing artillery.

Nathan Evans cut a new slice of tobacco that he plugged into one of his cheeks. ‘And just what in the name of God were you doing in the woods beyond Sudley Fords?’

Starbuck paused and another shell cracked apart in black smoke and a stab of red flame. The intensity of the explosion was extraordinary to Starbuck, who again flinched as the percussive clap shivered the air, though Colonel Nathan Evans appeared entirely unworried by the sound apart from another inquiry of his mounted orderly that all was still well.

‘Ja, Colonel. All is vell. Don’t vorry yourself.’ The German orderly was a huge man with a woeful face and a curious stoneware barrel that was strapped like a rucksack on his broad back. His master, Colonel Evans, whom Starbuck had gathered from his captors was nicknamed ‘Shanks,’ did not look any more prepossessing by daylight than he had in the small hours of the morning; indeed, to Starbuck’s jaundiced eye, Evans most resembled one of the bent-backed Boston coal heavers who scuttled with hundredweight sacks of fuel from the street to the kitchen cellars, and it was hardly surprising, Starbuck thought, that the fastidious Washington Faulconer had refused to put himself under the South Carolinian’s command.

‘Well? You ain’t answered my question, boy.’ Evans glared at Starbuck. ‘What were you doing on the far side of the Run, eh?’

‘Colonel Faulconer sent me,’ Starbuck said defiantly.

‘Sent you? Why?’

Starbuck wanted to salve his pride and say that he had been sent to reconnoiter the woods beyond Bull Run, but he sensed the lie would never hold, and so he settled for the ignominious truth. ‘He didn’t want me in his regiment, sir. He was sending me back to my people.’

Evans turned to stare intently at the trees edging the Bull Run stream where his half-brigade was defending the stone bridge carrying the turnpike west from Washington. If the Northerners did attack this section of the Run then Evans’s defense would be desperate, for his brigade consisted only of a handful of light cavalry, four obsolete smoothbore cannon, an understrength infantry regiment from South Carolina and another, equally undermanned, from Louisiana. Beauregard had left the brigade thus thinly defended because he was certain that the battle would be fought far out on the Confederate right wing. So far, and fortunately for Evans, the Northern assault on the brigade had been restricted to harassing rifle and artillery fire, though one of the enemy’s cannon delivered a shell so monstrous that the sky seemed to tremble each time one passed overhead.

Evans watched the trees with his head cocked to one side as though he was judging the course of the fighting by the noise of battle. To Starbuck the rifle and musket fire sounded oddly like the fierce crackling of burning dry undergrowth, while above it boomed the artillery fire. The flight of the shells made a noise like ripping cloth, or perhaps bacon frying, except that every now and then the sizzling would swell into a sudden ear-hurting crash as a missile exploded. A few rifle bullets snickered close by Evans’s small group, some of them making an eerie whistling. It was all very odd to Starbuck, who was aware of his heart thumping in his chest, yet, in all truth, he was not so frightened of the shells and bullets as he was of the fierce, bow-legged Shanks Evans, who now turned back to the prisoner. ‘Goddamn Faulconer was sending you to your people?’ Evans asked. ‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘My family, sir. In Boston.’

‘Oh, Boston!’ Evans guffawed the name gleefully, inviting his staff to join his mockery. ‘A shit hole. A piss hole. A city of puling crap. Christ, but I hate Boston. A city of black-assed Republican trash. A city of interfering, hymn-singing, lickbelly women who are no damned good for anything.’ Evans spat a lavish gob of tobacco-laced spittle onto Starbuck’s shoes. ‘So Faulconer was sending you back to Boston, was he, boy? Why?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Don’t know, sir,’ Evans mimicked Starbuck, ‘or perhaps you’re telling me lies, you miserable twist of shit. Maybe you’re trying to drag my men away from the bridge, is that it, you shit-belly?’ The Colonel’s vehemence was terrifying, overwhelming, blistering, forcing Starbuck to take an involuntary backward step as the Colond’s harangue spattered him with spittle. ‘You’re trying to sell me down the river, you cuffee bastard. You want me to open the pike so the Northern bastards can swarm over the bridge and then we’ll all be hanging from the trees come nightfall. Ain’t that right, you son of a no-good bitch?’ There was a few seconds’ silence, then Evans repeated his question in a voice that was a high-pitched scream. ‘Ain’t that right, you son of a cuffee bitch?’

‘There’s a column of Northern troops in the woods beyond the Sudley Fords.’ Starbuck somehow managed to keep his voice calm. He gave his hands a futile jerk, trying to point to the north, but the pinion at his wrists was far too secure. ‘They’re marching this way, sir, and they’ll be here in another hour or so.’

Another shell crashed into the pasture beyond the turnpike where Evans’s two reserve artillery pieces stood waiting in the uncut grass. The resting gunners did not even look up, not even when one of the giant shells fell shorter than usual and tore a branch from a nearby tree before exploding forty yards away in a turmoil of dirt, leaves, iron fragments and hot smoke.

‘How’s my barrelito, Otto?’ Evans shouted.

‘No harm, Colonel. Don’t you vorry.’ The German sounded impassive.

‘I vorry,’ Evans growled, ‘I vorry about lunkhead pieces of shit from Boston. What’s your name, boy?’

‘Nathaniel, sir. Nathaniel Starbuck.’

‘If you’re lying to me, Nathaniel Shitface, I’ll take you to the woodshed and cut your balls off. If you’ve got any balls. Have you got balls, Nathaniel?’ Starbuck said nothing. He was feeling relieved that this furious, foul-tongued man had not connected his surname to the Reverend Elial. Two more shells screamed overhead and an overshot rifle bullet made its odd whistling noise as it flicked past. ‘So if I move my men to face your column, fairy-shit’—Evans thrust his face so close to Starbuck that the Bostonian could smell the mephitic mix of whiskey and tobacco on the South Carolinian’s breath—’I’ll be letting the enemy across the bridge here, won’t I, and then there’ll be no Confederacy anymore, will there? And then the emancipating shitheads from Boston will come down to rape our women, if that’s what the hymn singers from Boston do. Maybe they’d prefer to rape our men? Is that your taste, cuffee-boy? You’d like to rape me, would you?’

Again Starbuck said nothing. Evans spat derision of Starbuck’s silence, then turned to see a gray-coated infantryman limping back along the turnpike. ‘Where in hell are you going?’ Evans exploded in sudden fury at the soldier, who just stared back in blank astonishment. ‘You can still shoot a rifle, can’t you?’ Evans screamed. ‘So get back! Unless you want those black-assed Republicans fathering your wife’s next bastards? Get back!’ The man turned and limped painfully back toward the bridge, using his rifle-musket as a crutch.

A solid shot slapped dust from the turnpike, then ricocheted on without hitting anyone in Evans’s headquarters group, but the wind of the shot’s passing seemed to stagger the injured infantryman who swayed on his makeshift crutch, then collapsed at the roadside close by the two reserve six-pounder guns. Evans’s other two guns were closer to the Bull Run, returning the enemy’s fire with shrapnel shells that burst in the distant air like sudden small gray clouds from which fizzing white smoke trails spiraled crazily earthward. Whether the shells were finding their targets no one knew, but in truth Evans was merely firing to keep up his men’s morale.

The reserve gunners bided their time. Most lay on their backs, apparently dozing. Two men tossed a ball back and forth while an officer, spectacles perched low on his nose, leaned on a bronze barrel and turned the pages of a book. A shirt-sleeved gunner with bright red suspenders sat with his back against the gun’s offside wheel. He was writing, dipping his pen into an ink bottle that rested in the grass by his side. The men’s insouciance did not seem out of place for, though the fighting was generating a carapace of noise and smoke, there was no great sense of urgency. Starbuck had expected battle to be more vigorous, like the newspaper accounts of the Mexican War that had told of General Scott’s brave troops carrying the American flag through shot and screaming shell into the Halls of Montezuma, but there was almost an abstracted air about this morning’s events. The gunner officer slowly turned a page, the letter writer carefully drained ink from his pen’s nib before lifting it to the page, while one of the ball players missed a catch and laughed lazily. The wounded infantryman lay in the ditch, hardly moving.

‘So what do I do with the sumbitch, Colonel?’ one of the Louisiana cavalrymen guarding Starbuck asked.

Evans had been frowning toward the mist of smoke that hung above the stone bridge. He turned bad-temperedly back to announce his decision about Starbuck, but was interrupted before he could speak. ‘A message, sir.’ The speaker was the lieutenant who had accompanied Evans on his abortive visit to Faulconer’s tent that morning. The lieutenant was mounted on a gaunt gray horse and carried a pair of field glasses with which he had been watching the semaphore station on the hill. ‘From the wig-wag, sir. Our left is turned.’ The lieutenant spoke without a trace of emotion.

There was a moment’s stillness as one of the enemy’s monstrous shells ripped overhead. The injured man beside the road was trying to stand, but seemed too feeble to rise. ‘Say that again, Meadows,’ Evans demanded.

Lieutenant Meadows consulted his notebook. ‘“Look out on your left, you are turned.” Those are the exact words, sir.’

Evans swiveled fast to stare north, though nothing showed there except the heavy summer trees and a high hawk soaring. Then he turned back to Starbuck, his small eyes wide with shock. ‘I owe you an apology, boy. By God I owe you an apology. I’m sorry, so I am, sorry!’ Evans blurted out the last word, then twisted again, this time to stare toward the stone bridge. His left hand twitched spasmodically at his side, the only evidence of the strain he was enduring. ‘This is a pretense. They ain’t attacking here, they’re just stroking our bellies, fooling us, keeping us still while the real attack comes up our backsides. Jesus!’ He had been speaking to himself, but suddenly he snapped into a much louder voice. ‘Horse! Bring my horse! Get on your horse, boy!’ This last was to Starbuck.

‘Sir!’ Starbuck yelped.

‘Boy?’

‘I’m tied up.’

‘Release the boy! Otto?’

‘Ja, Colonel?’

‘Give Boston some barrelito. One cup.’ It seemed that Evans had chosen the name ‘Boston’ for Starbuck’s nickname, just as the curious stone barrel on the German orderly’s back was called ‘barrelito.’

The big German rode his piebald horse close to Starbuck while another man, hurrying to obey Evans’s orders, cut the rope at Starbuck’s wrists. Starbuck began massaging the rope burns, then saw that the impassive German orderly had reached behind his back to manipulate a small wooden tap that was let into the base of the stoneware barrel. The German drew a tin cup of liquid from the barrel, then solemnly handed the cup down to Starbuck. ‘Trink! Come now, quick! I need the cup again. Trink!’

Starbuck accepted the cup that was filled with what appeared to be cold tea. He was thirsty as a dog and eagerly tipped the cup to his lips, then half choked for the liquid was not tea, but whiskey; raw, hard, undiluted whiskey.

‘Trink up!’ Otto sounded bad-tempered.

‘My horse!’ Evans yelled. A shell screamed overhead, thumping into the hill behind. At the very same moment a solid shot struck the wounded man beside the road, killing him instantly and flinging his blood ten feet into the air. Starbuck saw what he thought was the man’s severed leg spinning through the air, then instantly rejected the sight as unreal. Another solid shot cracked into a tree, splitting a three-foot lance of fresh wood from the trunk and showering leaves onto the raggedly torn leg. Then Lieutenant Meadows, who had repeated the wig-wagger’s alarming message, suddenly gulped and widened his eyes. He was staring at Starbuck and his eyes seemed to grow wider and wider as his hand slowly strayed to his throat, where a bead of blood swelled and glistened. His notebook slipped to the ground, its pages fluttering, as the bead of blood grew and split, then suddenly he choked a flood of gore down his tunic’s front. He swayed, gargling blood, then his whole body twitched violently as he slid out of the saddle and onto the grass. ‘I’ll take Meadows’s horse,’ Evans snapped, and grabbed the gray’s reins. The dying man’s foot was caught in the stirrup. Evans jerked it free, then pulled himself up onto the horse’s back.

Starbuck drained the tin cup, gasped for breath, then reached for Pocahontas’s reins. He clambered awkwardly into the saddle, wondering what he was supposed to do now that he was free.

‘Boston!’ Evans turned his horse toward Starbuck. ‘Will that bastard Faulconer listen to you?’

‘I think so, sir,’ Starbuck said, then, more honestly, ‘I don’t know, sir.’

Evans frowned as a thought came to him. ‘Why are you fighting for us, Boston? This ain’t your fight.’

Starbuck did not know what to say. His reasons were more to do with his father than with America’s destiny, still more to do with Sally than with slavery, but this did not seem the time or the place to explain such things. ‘Because I’m a rebel.’ He offered the explanation feebly, knowing its inadequacy.

But it pleased Nathan Evans, who had just taken a mug of whiskey from his stern-looking orderly. He drained the mug. ‘Well, you’re my rebel now, Boston, so find Faulconer and tell him I want his precious Legion. Tell him I’m moving most of my troops to the Sudley Road, and I want his Virginians up there too. Tell him to form on my left.’

Starbuck, dizzied by the whiskey, his change of fortune and by the sense of panic whirling in the humid air, tried to insert a note of caution into Evans’s planning. ‘Colonel Faulconer was determined to move to the right wing, sir.’

‘Damn what Faulconer wants!’ Evans screamed so loud that the idling gunners across the turnpike were startled. ‘Tell Faulconer that the Confederacy needs him! Tell the bastard we have to stop the Yankees or else we’ll all be doing Lincoln’s rope dance tonight! I’m trusting you, boy! Get Faulconer and tell the bastard to fight, damn his eyes! Tell the damp-bellied bastard to fight!’ Evans shouted the last words, then savaged his heels back, leaving Starbuck astonished and alone as the staff officers and orderlies streamed after Evans toward the men defending the stone bridge.

Bullets snicked and whimpered in the heavy air. Flies were gathering thick in the ditch to lay their eggs in the gobbets of flesh that had been a man just moments before. Lieutenant Meadows lay on his back with his dead eyes showing surprise and his blood-swilled mouth gaping wide open. Starbuck, the whiskey sour in his belly, gathered the reins, turned Pocahontas’s head, and went to find the Legion.

The Faulconer Legion took its first casualty at around five minutes past eight in the morning. A shell came over the hill to the east, skipped once on the reverse slope, tumbled in the air with a horrid shrieking noise, then struck the ground a second time some twelve yards in front of A Company. The shell exploded there, driving a splinter of jagged iron into the skull of Joe Sparrow, the boy who had a scholarship to the university, but who now died as easy a death as any soldier could wish. One moment he was standing upright, grinning at a joke told by Cyrus Matthews, and the next he was on his back. He twitched once, felt nothing, died.

‘Joe?’ Cyrus asked.

The other men edged nervously away from the collapsed boy, all but his friend George Waters, who had been standing beside Sparrow in the second rank and who now dropped to his knees beside the body. Sparrow’s cap had been tugged round by the force of the striking shell fragment and George now tried to pull it straight, but as he tugged at the cap’s stiff visor a terrible wash of blood escaped from under the sweatband. ‘Oh, God!’ George Waters recoiled from the horrid sight. ‘He’s dead!’

‘Don’t be a lunkhead, boy. Skulls bleed like stuck pigs, you know that.’ Sergeant Howes had pushed through the ranks and now knelt beside Sparrow. ‘Come on, Runt, wake up!’ He pulled the cap straight, trying to hide the blood, then slapped the dead boy lightly on the cheek. This was Blanche and Frank Sparrow’s only boy, the pride of their lives. Blanche had tried real hard to persuade the boy not to march to war, but someone had left a scornful petticoat on their front porch, addressed to Joe, and young Joe had wanted to join the Legion anyways and so Blanche had relented, but now Joe was flat on his back in a field.

‘Call the doctor! The doctor!’ Paul Hinton, captain of A Company, slid out of his saddle and shouted the order.

Major Danson came running with his medical bag from the rear of the regiment where the band was playing ‘Annie Laurie,’ the saxhorn tubas embroidering a clever bass line in counterpoint to the plangent melody that was so popular with the men. Danson pushed through the ranks of A Company. ‘Give him air!’ he shouted, which is what he usually shouted whenever he was called to a sick person. Invariably the field hands or the servants or the family members all crowded about the patient, and Danson could not stand working amidst a throng of onlookers all offering suggestions. If they were so knowledgeable, he often wondered, why did they need him? ‘Stand back, now. Who is it, Dan?’

‘Blanche Sparrow’s boy, doc,’ Hinton said.

‘Not young Joe! Now come on, Joe, you’ll be missing all the fun!’ Doctor Danson dropped to his knees. ‘What’s the matter, now? Got hit on the head, did you?’

‘He’s dead.’ George Waters had gone white with shock.

Major Danson frowned at this amateur diagnosis, then felt for Joseph Sparrow’s pulse. He said nothing for a few seconds, then lifted off the blood-stained forage cap to reveal Joe’s hair all soaked and matted red. ‘Oh, poor Blanche,’ the doctor said softly, ‘what are we to tell her?’ He unbuttoned the collar of the dead boy’s tunic as if to give him air.

Another ricocheted shell whipsawed overhead and crashed to earth a half mile beyond the regiment, its explosion lost in the dense foliage of a stand of trees. Adam Faulconer, who had been standing his horse on the hill crest to watch the cannonade ripple smoke and flame about the distant stream, now realized something was amiss within the Legion’s ranks and spurred back to the regiment. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked Doctor Danson.

‘It’s Blanche’s boy, young Joe.’

‘Oh, God, no.’ There was an awful pain in Adam’s voice. The day was already bringing Adam the violence he had feared, and yet, he suspected, the battle had not really begun. The two sides had made contact and were hurling shells at each other, but neither seemed to have launched a real assault.

‘Blanche will never live with this,’ Danson said, struggling to his feet. ‘I remember when Joe nearly died of the whooping cough and I thought she’d go with him to his grave. Dear God, what a terrible thing.’ Around him a ring of soldiers stared aghast at the dead boy. It was not that death was so strange to any of them; all had seen sisters or brothers or cousins or parents laid out in the parlor, and all had helped carry a casket into the church or had helped pull a drowned body from the river, but this was different; this was chance death, war’s lottery, and it could just as easily have been themselves lying there all bloody and still. This was something they were not really prepared for, because nothing in their training had convinced them that young men ended up open-mouthed, flat on their backs, fly-blown, bloodied and dead.

‘Carry him to the back, lads,’ Captain Hinton now said. ‘Lift him up! Careful now!’ Hinton supervised the removal of the body, then walked back to Adam. ‘Where’s your father, Adam?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He should be here.’ Hinton gathered his horse’s reins and hauled himself laboriously into the saddle.

‘I suppose the general’s keeping him,’ Adam suggested lamely. There was a glistening patch of blood beside Joe Sparrow’s fallen cap on the grass. ‘Poor Blanche,’ Adam said. ‘We took Joe out of the color party because we reckoned he’d be safer in the ranks.’

But Hinton was not listening. Instead he was frowning eastward to where a horseman had appeared on the brow of the hill. ‘Is that Starbuck? It is, by God!’

Adam turned and, to his astonishment, saw that it was indeed Starbuck who was galloping toward the Legion and, for a second, Adam thought he must be seeing ghosts, then he saw that it really was his friend who, not three hours before, had been dispatched back North to his own people, but who had now returned coatless, pale, hurried, and urgent. ‘Where’s your father?’ Starbuck shouted.

‘I don’t know, Nate.’ Adam had ridden to meet his friend. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Where’s Pecker?’ Starbuck’s voice was curt, ungiving, out of tune with the melancholy mood of Sparrow’s death.

‘What are you doing here, Nate?’ Adam asked again, spurring his horse after Starbuck. ‘Nate?’

But Starbuck had already kicked his horse down the front of the Legion to where Major Bird stood beneath the Legion’s colors that hung limp in the windless air.

‘Sir!’ Starbuck reined in close to Bird.

Bird blinked up at the horseman. ‘Starbuck? I was told to discharge you! Are you certain you’re meant to be here?’

‘Sir.’ Nathaniel Starbuck sounded stilted and formal. ‘Colonel Evans sent me, sir. He wants us to advance on the Sudley Road. The enemy has crossed the stream by Sudley Church, and are marching this way.’

Pecker Bird blinked up at the young man and noted that Starbuck had sounded remarkably calm, which calmness, he supposed, was a perverse symptom of the boy’s excitement, and then Bird thought how astonishingly well everyone was playing their soldierly parts on this unlikely morning. ‘Aren’t those orders more properly addressed to Colonel Faulconer?’ Bird heard himself asking, and was amazed that his natural inclination was so to avoid taking the responsibility.

‘If I could find the Colonel, sir, I’d tell him. But I don’t think there’s time, and if we don’t move, sir, there won’t be anything left of this army.’

‘Is that so?’ Bird also sounded calm, but his hands were clawing through his beard with the stress of the moment. He opened his mouth to speak again, but no sound came. He was thinking that he too would have to play a soldierly part, now that fate had dropped this responsibility into his lap, and then he pusillanimously thought that a soldier’s duty was to obey and Colonel Faulconer’s orders had been very specific: that he was to ignore any instructions from Colonel Nathan Evans. Faulconer was even now attempting to have the Legion deployed southward to where Beauregard expected the main battle to be fought, but Colonel Nathan Evans wanted the Legion to march northward and was evidently claiming that the Confederacy’s entire future depended on Bird’s obedience.