Call for artillery and infantry and get up and eat and retreat and all that, and it got a mite confusin’, so Ole Dan Butterfield wrote a call for this here Brigade, special. If there is an order for this Brigade, well, somebody else would be blowing his blame bugle and we’d think it was for us only it wasn’t, but we would follow the order anyway, and next thing you know we’d be in trouble.”

”That happened to us once,” the Maine man said. “Half | the Regiment charged and the other half retreated. You had your choice.” He chuckled. “Seems a good system, come to think on it.”

”Well, in this Brigade we got a special call. You hear that call and you know the next call is for you. Goes like this: “We call it ‘Dan Butterfield,’ just like this: ‘Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield.’” The Maine man said glumly, “In the middle of a fight I’m supposed to remember that?”

”It’s easy if you remember.” He sang it again: “Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield.”

”Um,” the Maine man said.

”Ole Butterfield wrote a lot of bugle calls. You know Butterfield’s Lullaby?”

”Butterfield’s what?”

Tom hummed a few bars of what was still known as Butterfield’s Lullaby but which the army would later know as “Taps” and which now had no connotation of death, which simply meant rest for the night, rest after a long day in the dust and the sun, with the bugles blaring, and Joshua Chamberlain, listening, thought of the sound of Butterfield’s Lullaby coming out of the dark, through a tent flap, with the campfires burning warm and red in the night, and Chamberlain thought: you can grow to love it.

Amazing. Chamberlain let his eyes close down to the slits, retreating within himself. He had learned that you could sleep on your feet on the long marches. You set your feet to going and after a while they went by themselves and you sort of turned your attention away and your feet went on walking painlessly, almost without feeling, and gradually you closed down your eyes so that all you could see were the heels of the man in front of you, one heel, other heel, one heel, other heel, and so you moved on dreamily in the heat and the dust, closing your eyes against the sweat, head down and gradually darkening, so you actually slept with the sight of the heels in front of you, one heel, other heel, and often when the man in front of you stopped you bumped into him. There were no heels today, but there was the horse he led by the reins. He did not know the name of this horse.

He did not bother any more; the horses were all dead too soon. Yet you learn to love it.

Isn’t that amazing? Long marches and no rest, up very early in the morning and asleep late in the rain, and there’s a marvelous excitement to it, a joy to wake in the morning and feel the army all around you and see the campfires in the morning and smell the coffee…

… awake all night in front of Fredericksburg. We attacked in the afternoon, just at dusk, and the stone wall was aflame from one end to the other, too much smoke, couldn’t see, the attack failed, couldn’t withdraw, lay there all night in the dark, in the cold among the wounded and dying. Piled-up bodies in front of you to catch the bullets, using the dead for a shield; remember the sound? Of bullets in dead bodies? Like a shot into a rotten leg, a wet thick leg.

All a man is: wet leg of blood. Remember the flap of a torn curtain in a blasted window, fragment-whispering in that awful breeze: never, forever, never, forever.

You have a professor’s mind. But that is the way it sounded.

Never. Forever.

Love that too?

Not love it. Not quite. And yet, I was never so alive.

Maine… is silent and cold.

Maine in the winter: air is darker, the sky is a deeper dark. A darkness comes with winter that these Southern people don’t know. Snow falls so much earlier and in the winter you can walk in a snowfield among bushes, and visitors don’t know that the bushes are the tops of tall pines, and you’re standing in thirty feet of snow. Visitors. Once long ago visitors in the dead of winter: a preacher preaching hell-fire. Scared the fool out of me. And I resented it and Pa said I was right.

Pa.

When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man, a noble man. Little humor but sometimes the door opened and you saw the warmth within a long way off, a certain sadness, a slow, remote, unfathomable quality as if the man wanted to be closer to the world but did not know how. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: “What a piece of work is man… in action how like an angel!” And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, “Well, boy, if he’s an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.”

And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it. The old man was proud of his son, the Colonel Of Infantry. What would he have thought of the speech this morning? Home and Mother. Mother wanted me to be a parson. Vincent picked me, me, to lead the Regiment. Folks back home will know by now.

Commander of the Regiment. Why me? What did Vincent see?

He turned his mind away from that. Think on it when the time comes. You think too much beforehand and you get too self-conscious and tight and you don’t function well. He knew that he was an instinctive man, not a planner, and he did best when he fell back on instinct. Think of music now and singing. Pass the time with a bit of harmony Hum songs, and rest.

But it was very hot.

Could use some Maine cool now.

Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not.

But truth is it’s just all rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I’m no stranger here.

Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there’s nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I’m at home everywhere.

Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world.

Tom Chamberlain was saying, “You should have seen the last commander. Old Ames. He was the worst, I mean to tell you, the triple-toed half-wound, spotted mule worst.”

”Where was you boys at Chancellorsville?”

”Well now.” A painful subject. Joshua Chamberlain opened his eyes.

”The fact is,” Tom said gloomily, “we was not engaged.”

”Well now, a lot of us wa’nt engaged. That there Hooker, I hear he froze right up like a pond in the dark.”

”Well, we had us a misfortune.” Tom turned eyes sad as a trout. He was a lean, happy, excitable man who had turned out to be calm and serene in combat. Soldiering was beginning to intrigue him.

”The thing was, damn, we had these here ‘noculations.

You ever been ‘noculated?”

The man swore earnestly Tom nodded. “Well, then, you a know Only thing was, we wound up sick, half the dang regiment. And come time for the fight at Chancellorsville our Surgeon Major-that’s a stumble-fingered man named Wormy Monroe-he up and reported us unfit for combat.

So they went ahead and sent us back to mind the dang telegraph wires. We wasn’t allowed to ‘sociate with nobody.

Old Lawrence there he went on up and argued, but wouldn’t nobody come near us. It was like he was carrying the plague. Lawrence said hang it, we ought to be the first ones in, we’d probably give the Rebs a disease and be more useful than any other outfit in the whole army. Matter of fact, way things turned, we probably would’ve been more use than most of them people. Anyway we wasn’t in it.”