Prelude

1 October

Outside Camp Hill, Pennsylvania

T he leaves on the trees were beginning to go from green to red, as if swiped by a painter's brush. A lot of the grass near the banks of the Susquehanna, down by New Cumberland, had been painted red, too, red with blood.

A courier came galloping back to Robert E. Lee's headquarters, his face smudged with black-powder smoke but glowing with excitement beneath the minstrel-show markings. "We have 'em, sir!" he cried to Lee as he reined in his blowing horse. "We have 'em! General Jackson says for me to tell you D. H. Hill's division is around McClellan's left and rolling 'em up. 'God has delivered them into our hands,' he says."

"That is very fine," Lee murmured. He peered through the thick smoke, but piercing it was impossible, even with the polished brass spyglass that lay on the folding table in front of him. He had to rely on reports from couriers like this eager young man, but all the reports, from just after the rising of the sun when the battle was joined till now with it sinking in blood- more blood, he thought-behind him, had been what he'd prayed to hear.

Colonel Robert Chilton, his assistant adjutant general, was no more able than the courier to contain his excitement. "Very fine, sir?" he burst out. "It's better than that. With Longstreet holding the Yankees in the center, McLaws outflanking them on the left, and now Stonewall on the right, they're in a sack Napoleon couldn't have got out of. And if there's one soldier in the world who's no Napoleon, it's the 'Young Napoleon' the Federals have."

"General McClellan, whatever his virtues, is not a hasty man," Lee observed, smiling at Chilton's derisive use of the grandiloquent nickname the Northern papers had given the commander of the Army of the Potomac. "Those people"-his own habitual name for the foe-"were also perhaps ill-advised to accept battle in front of a river with only one bridge offering a line of retreat should their plans miscarry."