Copperhead. Bernard Cornwell

The gunfire was fairly constant now, but it was nothing like the splintering crackle of battle. Instead it was a methodical, workmanlike sound that suggested the two sides were merely trading ammunition because it was expected of them rather than trying to inflict slaughter upon each other. “What’s happening?” Adam demanded.

      Major Thaddeus Bird explained that two groups of Yankees had crossed the river. Adam had already encountered one of the invading parties, while the other was up on the high ground by Harrison’s Island. No one was quite sure what the Yankees intended by the double incursion. Early on it had seemed they were trying to capture Leesburg, but a single company of Mississippi men had turned back the Federal advance. “A man called Duff,” Bird told Adam, “stopped the rascals cold. Lined his fellows up in the stark middle of a field and traded them shot for shot, and damn me if they didn’t go scuttling back uphill like a flock of frightened sheep!” The story of Duff’s defiance had spread through Evans’s brigade to fill the men with pride in southern invincibility. The remainder of Duff’s battalion was in place now, keeping the Yankees pinned among the trees at the bluffs summit. “You should tell Johnston about Duff,” Bird told Adam.

      But Adam did not seem interested in the Mississippian’s heroism. “And you, Uncle, what are you doing?” he asked instead.

      “Waiting for orders, of course. I guess Evans doesn’t know where to send us, so he’s waiting to see which pack of Yankees is the more dangerous. Once that’s determined, we’ll go and knock some heads bloody.”

      Adam flinched at his uncle’s tone. Before he had joined the Legion and unexpectedly became its senior officer, Thaddeus Bird had been a schoolmaster who had professed a sardonic mockery of both soldiering and warfare, but one battle and a few months of command had turned Adam’s uncle into an altogether grimmer man. He retained his wit, but now it had a harsher edge, a symptom, Adam thought, of how war changed everything for the worse, though Adam sometimes wondered if he alone was aware of just how the war was coarsening and degrading all it touched. His fellow aides at the army headquarters reveled in the conflict, seeing it as a sporting rivalry that would award victory to the most enthusiastic players. Adam listened to such bombast and held his peace, knowing that any expression of his real views would be met with scorn at best and charges of chickenhearted cowardice at worst. Yet Adam was no coward. He simply believed the war was a tragedy born from pride and stupidity, and so he did his duty, hid his true feelings, and yearned for peace, though how long he could sustain either the pretense or the duplicity, he did not know. “Let’s hope no one’s head needs to be bloodied today,” he told his uncle. “It’s much too fine a day for killing.” He turned as K Company’s cooks lifted a pot off the flames. “Is that dinner?”

      The midday dinner was cush: a stew of beef, bacon fat, and cornbread that was accompanied by a mash of boiled apples and potatoes. Food was plentiful here in Loudoun County where the farmland was rich and Confederate troops few. In Centreville and Manassas, Adam said, supplies were much more difficult. “They even ran out of coffee last month! I thought there’d be a mutiny.” He then listened with pretended amusement as Robert Decker and Amos Tunney told of Captain Starbuck’s great coffee raid. They had crossed the river by night and marched five miles through woods and farmland to raid a sutler’s stores on the outskirts of a northern camp. Eight men had gone with Starbuck and eight had come back, and the only northerner to detect them had been the sutler himself, a merchant whose living came from selling luxuries to troops. The sutler, sleeping among his stores, had shouted the alarm and pulled a revolver.

      “Poor man,” Adam said.

      “Poor man?” Starbuck protested his friend’s display of pity. “He was trying to shoot us!”

      “So what did you do?”

      “Cut his throat,” Starbuck said. “Didn’t want to alert the camp, you see, by firing a shot.”

      Adam shuddered. “You killed a man for some coffee beans?”

      “And some whiskey and dried peaches,” Robert Decker put in enthusiastically. “The newspapers over there reckoned it was secesh sympathizers. Bushwhackers, they called us. Bushwhackers! Us!”

      “And next day we sold ten pounds of the coffee back to some Yankee pickets across the river!” Amos Tunney added proudly.

      Adam smiled thinly, then refused the offer of a mug of coffee, pleading that he preferred plain water. He was sitting on the ground and winced slightly as he shifted his weight onto his wounded leg. He had his father’s broad face, squarecut fair beard, and blue eyes. It was a face, Starbuck had always thought, of uncomplicated honesty, though these days it seemed Adam had lost his old humor and replaced it with a perpetual care for the world’s problems.

      After the meal the two friends walked eastward along the edge of the meadow. The Legion’s wood and sod shelters were still in place, looking like grass-covered pigpens. Starbuck, pretending to listen to his friend’s tales of headquarters life, was actually thinking how much he had enjoyed living in his turf-covered shelter. Once abed he felt like a beast in a burrow: safe, hidden, and secret. His old bedroom in Boston with its oak paneling and wide pine boards and gas mantels and solemn bookshelves seemed like a dream now, something from a different life. “It’s odd how I like being uncomfortable,” he said lightly.

      “Didn’t you hear what I said?” Adam demanded.

      “Sorry, dreaming.”

      “I was talking about McClellan,” Adam said. “Everyone agrees he’s a genius. Even Johnston says McClellan was quite the cleverest man in all the old U.S. Army.” Adam spoke enthusiastically, as though McClellan were the new southern commander and not the leader of the north’s Army of the Potomac. Adam glanced to his right, disturbed by a sudden crescendo in the sound of musketry coming from the woods above the distant river. The firing had been desultory in the last hour, but now it rose to a sustained crackle that sounded like dry tinder burning fierce. It raged for a half minute or so, then fell back to a steady and almost monotonous mutter. “They must cross back to Maryland soon!” Adam said angrily, as though he were offended by the stubbornness of the Yankees in staying on this side of the river.

      “So tell me more about McClellan,” Starbuck said.

      “He’s the coming man,” Adam said in a spirited voice. “It happens in war, you know. The old fellows begin the fight, then they get winnowed out by the young ones with new ideas. They say McClellan’s the new Napoleon, Nate, a stickler for order and discipline!” Adam paused, evidently worried that he maybe sounded too enamored of the enemy’s new general. “Did you really cut a man’s throat for coffee?” he asked awkwardly.

      “It wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as Decker makes it sound,” Starbuck said. “I tried to keep the man quiet without hurting him. I didn’t want to kill him.” In truth he had been scared to death of the moment, shaking and panicked, but he had known that the safety of his men had depended on keeping the sutler silent.

      Adam grimaced. “I can’t imagine killing a man with a knife.”

      “It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing,” Starbuck confessed, “but Truslow made me practice on some ration hogs, and it isn’t as hard as you’d think.”

      “Good God,” Adam said faintly. “Hogs?”

      “Only young ones,” Starbuck said. “Incredibly hard to kill, even so. Truslow makes it look easy, but then he makes everything look easy.”

      Adam pondered the idea of practicing the skills of killing as though they were the rudiments of a trade. It seemed tragic. “Couldn’t you have just stunned the poor man?” He asked.

      Starbuck laughed at the question. “I had to make sure of the fellow, didn’t I? Of course I had to! My men’s lives depended on his silence, and you look after your men. That’s the first rule of soldiering.”

      “Did Truslow teach you that too?” Adam asked.

      “No.” Starbuck sounded surprised at the question. “That’s an obvious rule, isn’t it?”

      Adam