The redheaded sergeant hit him in the back with his fist. "Move your ass!" the sergeant said.

Out in the sunlight Willie saw a cannonball skip along the ground like a jackrabbit, take off a man's leg at the thigh, bounce once, and cut another man in half.

The sergeant hit him again, then knotted his shirt behind the neck and shoved him forward. Suddenly Willie was in the sunlight, the sweat on his face like ice water, the peach orchard blooming with puffs of smoke. "Where was Jim?"

The initial skirmish line wilted and crumpled in a withering volley from the orchard. A second line of men advanced behind the first, and, from a standing position, aimed and fired into the pink flowers drifting down from the peach trees. Willie heard the Irish sergeant wheezing, gasping for breath behind him. He waited for another fist in the middle of his back.

But when he turned he saw the sergeant standing motionless in the smoke, his mouth puckered like a fish's, a bright hole in his throat leaking down his shirt, his carbine slipping from his hand. "Get down, Willie!" he heard Jim shout behind him. Jim knocked him flat just as a wheeled Yankee cannon, in the middle of a sunken road, roared back on its carriage and blew a bucket of grapeshot into the Confederate line.

Men in butternut and gray fell like cornstalks cut with a scythe. The colonel who had carried the Bonnie Blue flag lay dead in the grass, his sword stuck at a silly angle in the soft earth. Some tried to kneel and reload, but a battery none of them could see rained exploding shells in their midst, blowing fountains of dirt and parts of men in the air. Many of those fleeing over the bodies of their comrades for the protection of the woods were vectored in a crossfire by sharpshooters rising from the pits on the far side ol the sunken road.

Then there was silence, and in the silence Willie thought he heard someone beating a broken cadence on a drumhead, like a fool who does not know a Mardi Gras parade has come to an end.

THROUGH the morning and afternoon thousands of men moved in and out of the trees, stepping through the dead who flanged the edge of the woods or lay scattered across the breadth of the clearing. Columns of sunlight tunneled through the smoke inside the woods, and the air smelled of cordite, horse manure, trees set on fire from fused shells, and humus cratered out of the forest floor. Willie had lost his haversack, cartridge box, the scabbard for his bayonet, and his canteen, but he didn't know where or remember how. He had pulled a cartridge pouch off the belt of a dead man who had already been stripped of his shirt and shoes. Then he had found another dead man in a ravine, with his canteen still hung from his neck, and had pulled the cloth strap loose from the man's head and uncorked the canteen only to discover it was filled with corn whiskey.

He had never been so thirsty in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own throat.

Jim's canteen had been split in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed, their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Tennessee infantry, to which they now belonged through no volition of their own, to re-form and once again move on the sunken road that the Southerners were now calling the Hornets' Nest.

The leaves on the floor of the forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of his life.

Looking to the south, Willie could see horses pulling more cannons through the trees, twenty-four-pounders as high as a man, the spoked wheels knocking across rocks and logs. He pointed and told Jim to look at the cannons that were lumbering on their carriages through the hardwoods, then realized he could not hear.

He pressed his thumbs under his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages, but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass bell.

The cannons went past him, silently, through the leaves and scarred tree trunks, lumbering toward the peach orchard and the sunken road, as silently as if their wheels had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been, convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.

Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.

"What?" Willie said.

Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.

"-got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.

He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.

"Where's yours?" Willie asked.

"I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.

There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.

"Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.

Jim sat down against the tree bark.

"You hit any of them today?" he asked.

"I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.

"Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."

Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.

"They're no different from us, Jim," he said.

"Yes, they are. They're down here. We didn't go up there."

A young lieutenant strolled through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather flap of his pistol holster.

"Our cannoneers are about to start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another run at it," he said.

"We been out there eleven times, suh," a private on the ground said.

"Twelve's a charm. Stuff your fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the woods beyond.

Then the cannon crews began to fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground, the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes, chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.