But did not backbite the gamblers who found more luck in it Then or later in double-edged reminiscences; If any laurel can grow in the sad-colored fields Between Bull Run and Cub Run and Cat Hairpin Bend You should have a share of it for your hardworking ghost Because you played as you could with your cold, forced dice And neither wasted your men like the fighting fools Nor posed as an injured Napoleon twenty years later. Meanwhile, McDowell watched his long flanking column File by, on the Warrentown pike, in the first dawn-freshness. “Gentlemen, that’s a big force,” he said to his staff.

A full rifled battery begins to talk spitefully to Evans’ Carolinians. The grey skirmish-line, thrown forward on the other side of Bull Run, ducks its head involuntarily as a locomotive noise goes by in the air above it, and waits for a flicker of blue in the scrub-oaks ahead.