Then, suddenly, the Northerners were in sight. A mass of men ran soundlessly into view. Flags and bayonets were bright. For a second, a split heartbeat, Starbuck watched the rare sight of a whole army attacking straight into his face, then bellowed the order to open fire.
"Fire!" Patterson echoed the shout, and his company's front vanished in a cloud of powder smoke.
"Fire!" Moxey screamed at the company next door. Patterson's men were spitting bullets into rifles, shoving ramrods down barrels, and scrabbling for percussion caps in the upturned hats placed conveniently beside the firestep.
"Fire!" Company D's Captain Pine shouted.
"Fire!" Lieutenant Howes called from Company E. The Yankee attack was oblique, emerging from the trees first to the south, then to the north.
And suddenly, like a great tide bursting on a beach, the sound of the attack overwhelmed Starbuck. It was the sound of a great infantry charge: the noise of cheering, screaming, swearing men, and the noise of drums and bugles behind them, and the noise of his own men's bullets whacking into rifle stocks, and the noise of miniй bullets thumping into flesh, and the noise of the first wounded men screaming and gasping, and the noise of ramrods rattling metallic in rifles, and the whistling whip-quick noise of hollow-tailed miniй bullets, and the noise of thousands of heavy boots, and the noise of screaming orders, and the noise of men cursing their clumsiness as they fumbled to tear open cartridges.
It was an unending crescendo of noise, a tumult of battering sound waves that obliterated senses already swamped by powder smoke. All a man could do now was fight, and fighting meant pouring lead into the gunsmoke to drive away the pounding, cursing enemy. And the enemy still came forward, rank after rank of blue-coated men beneath their high striped banners. "Fire!" a Yankee shouted.
"Fire!" Truslow's voice answered from the Legion's left flank.
"They're firing high," Private Matthews exulted just five paces from Starbuck, then Matthews was flicked backward by a bullet to the head that took away a saucer-sized piece of his skull and spattered his neighbor with blood and brains. Lieutenant Patterson stood transfixed as Matthews's body slid to a halt at his feet. The body twitched, blood pouring from the shattered cranium.
"Fire!" Starbuck shouted. He saw a boy pull the trigger; nothing happened, yet the boy started to ram another charge down a barrel probably stuffed with unfired charges. Starbuck picked up Matthews's blood-sticky rifle and ran to the boy. "Fire the damn thing before you load it!" he snapped, handing the frightened lad the new gun. Starbuck took the boy's rifle and tossed it back out of the cutting. He fired his own rifle into the gray mist of smoke, then ran along the cutting past Moxey's company to where Medlicott guarded the vulnerable right flank. The miller was fighting well enough, firing his revolver into the smoke that was now being fed by the volleys of both sides to create a single filthy-smelling leprous yellow cloudbank. The Yankee charge seemed to have stalled, though it had not been defeated. Instead the Northerners were holding their ground in the killing patch and trying to overwhelm the rebel line with volley fire.
"We're still here, Starbuck, still here!" The speaker was the genial Colonel Hudson, who had come to his own left flank on an errand not dissimilar to Starbuck's own. "Mr. Lincoln's Republican party is noisy today, is it not?" the Colonel said, gesturing toward the Yankees with a switch of hazel that was apparently his weapon of choice. A bullet slapped past Hudson's long hair. "Rotten shot," the Colonel lamented, "terrible shooting! They really should look to their musket training."
Then a second great cheer sounded from beyond the smoke, and there was a resurgence of that first terrible sound that had swollen to burst against the rebels' defenses. "Dear Lord," Hudson said, "I do believe a second line is coming. Hold hard, boys! Hold hard!" He strode back along his line.
"Oh, Christ, oh, Christ!" Major Medlicott was fumbling percussion caps onto his revolver. "Oh, Christ!" He raised the gun, only half primed, and shot blindly into the smoke. Beyond that smoke the Yankee fire had slackened as the first wave of attackers made way for the second. The rebels fired on into the gloom, seeing their targets only as dark shadows in the luminous smoke cloud; then a screaming mass of men with fixed bayonets materialized in that fogbank.
"Back!" Medlicott shouted, and his men scrambled away from the shallow cutting.
"Stay and fight, damn it!" Starbuck bellowed, but the panic was infectious, and the company streamed past him. For a second Starbuck was alone in the wide ditch; then he saw the open mouths of Yankee attackers not ten paces away, and he ran for his life. He expected a bullet in the back at any second as he scrambled up the western bank and followed Medlicott's company into the tangle of saplings and bushes.
The Yankees scented victory. They cheered as they jumped down into the cutting and as they scrambled up its further bank. Their flags streamed forward. A gap had opened between the Legion and Hudson's North Carolinians, and the Northern infantry poured into the gap, where they discovered the unguarded spoil pit. Like a wave of water released by a broken dam they swarmed into the hollow, only to surge up against the abatis. They recoiled for a second as the tangle of branches checked their headlong charge; then they flowed around the barrier's flanks to swarm up to the spoil pit's edge.
"Fire!" Colonel Swynyard had brought Haxall's Arkansas battalion down the hill to meet the Yankee charge where it tried to climb out of the spoil pit. Rifles slashed fire into the pit. The rebels could not miss, for the Yankees were crammed tighter than rats in a terrier pit. "Fire!" Major Haxall called, and a second volley whipped down and the Yankee mass seemed to quiver like a great wounded beast.
"Get your men formed, and fight!" Swynyard shouted angrily at Starbuck. "Goddamn it, fight!"
"Damn!" Starbuck was lost, confused. The attackers in the pit were being slaughtered, but more Yankees had crossed the ditch and were charging through the scrub, where handfuls of dogged rebels resisted them. Starbuck blundered through the trees, seeking men, any men, finding nothing but chaos, and then he saw Peter Waggoner, the giant, Bible-thumping Sergeant from Company D. Sweet Jesus, Starbuck thought, but if Company D had been thrown out of the railbed, then the Legion must be unraveling all along its length. "Waggoner!"
"Sir?"
"Where's your company?"
"Here, sir! Here!" And there, crouching frightened behind the big Sergeant, was most of Company D. Captain Pine was pushing men into line, screaming at them to stand and fight.
"Fix bayonets," Starbuck called, "and follow me! And scream! For God's sake, scream!"
The ululating, blood-chilling sound of the rebel yell whipsawed in the air as the company followed Starbuck back toward the railbed. Goddamn it, but he would not be beaten! A Yankee appeared in front of Starbuck, and he fired his revolver straight into the man's face, which seemed to vanish in a spray of red as the shock of the gun's recoil jarred up to Starbuck's shoulder. He half slipped in a slick of blood, then fired into a mass of blue uniforms in front. "Charge!" he screamed. "Charge!" And Waggoner's men came with him, screaming like devils released to mischief, and the disordered Yankees went backward. The desperate charge through the brush had collected more groups of scattered Legionnaires, so that Starbuck was now leading almost a third of his regiment in a blood-crazed, desperate, vicious counterattack. The Northerners had been on the brink of victory but were suddenly confused by this unexpected opposition. The Yankees retreated.