In more than a dozen regiments of raw soldiery camping in the fields about Centreville that hot July evening were lads no older than George Lawton. Among the seasoned regulars, few as they were, serving either as fifers or drummers in the infantry and marines, buglers in the batteries or trumpeters in the cavalry, were some who were even younger,--boys born in the army far out on the frontier, perhaps, or at the few garrisoned forts on the Atlantic coast,--sons of soldiers who knew no other life and who would have felt awkward in any dress but the uniform. But there were few who did not at first feel, as Snipe felt, a nervous tremor about the knees at sound of those swift banging guns. Veteran soldiers soon learn that cannon may boom all day and little damage be done, and that the real sound that tells of deadly battle is the sustained crackle and crash of musketry. All through the excited army the news had gone that there had been a "meeting" Thursday down at Blackburn's Ford to the left front, "a reconnoissance in force," a staff-officer described it to silent, serious Major Stark, "merely to develop the enemy." But that reconnoissance had developed something else,--the fact that some of the raw regiments, bursting with eagerness to march to Richmond ten days earlier, couldn't stand fire to-day, for the moment the screaming shells from the Confederate guns on the southern bank of Bull Run came crashing through the timber on the north side, a new volunteer command, shoved in there to support a battery, scurried out of it in most undignified haste. Others, no older in service, but better led, stood their ground like men, despite their pale, anxious faces, and roundly jeered the "salt-workers." One thing was settled to the satisfaction of General McDowell, commanding the Union force, and that was that the routes to Manassas Junction, either by way of the Stone Bridge straight ahead on the broad pike, or more directly by the several fords farther down-stream, were vigilantly guarded, so that "the longest way round" would probably be the shortest way to that centre of rebel activity. There at Manassas the railways from the South and from the Shenandoah joined. There were the stores and supplies. There was the strategic point, and scattered along the wooded bluffs that hemmed the stream on the southern side, all along for nearly eight miles were stationed the Southern brigades. With Manassas at their backs five miles away, with Bull Run directly in their front, with only one broad road and four or five bridle-paths or wagon-tracks leading down to it, the Southern general felt well assured in his position and equally confident of his men.