The morning of April 1 went slowly, which suited Major General Philip Sheridan (North) not at all. The roads were still bad, the V Corps under Major General Gouverneur K. Warren (North) was strung out and slow to arrive and slower to form up, and the hours bled away while the sun climbed and started down the far side. Sheridan rode up and down in a fury, certain the chance was slipping. He could not attack until the infantry was in line, and the infantry would not hurry.

Behind the Confederate works, the afternoon went quietly, which suited the Confederate generals fine. Convinced that the only Union force in front of them was Sheridan’s cavalry, and that cavalry alone would not storm an entrenched line, Major General George E. Pickett (South) and his cavalry commander, Major General Fitzhugh Lee (South), rode off about a mile and a half to the rear to enjoy a shad bake, a springtime Virginia meal of fresh-caught river fish roasted on planks over a fire. They left no clear word that they were going, and they took no precaution to be reached quickly. The two senior men responsible for holding the last road into Petersburg sat down to lunch beyond earshot of their own line.

When the Union attack finally came on, late in the afternoon, the men at the fish fry did not hear it. The dense pine woods and a quirk of the wind seem to have swallowed the sound, a freak of terrain and weather that soldiers of the day called an acoustic shadow: a fight raging close by, and a strange pocket of silence over the spot where the commanders sat. Couriers sent to find Pickett could not, or were shot down trying. For the crucial opening of the battle, the Confederate force at Five Forks fought leaderless, its two top generals eating shad a mile and a half away while their line came apart.

It is the kind of detail that sounds invented and is not. By the time Pickett grasped that a real battle was underway and galloped back, riding through Union troops to reach his own men, much of his line was already gone.