"All right. Get into it now!"
Grass-fields, fences, and ploughed ground; all voices of the battle-field awake; yelling and cheering, crash of musketry, crack of rifles, roar of guns, shells that whooped in flight and burst into a score of individual screams. Beneath all, an undertone, a rumbling, grinding, splintering sound, the organ bass of the field; into the corn, that rustled as before, that brushed in turn against Northern and Southern faces, that sheltered alike from the slant sun all still faces in the furrows, pale and ghastly and grimed, thick together, piled dead over dead. Then came the fence, the road, the squat-chimneyed building, the gaping woods with black teeth and white breath; and Company B. Reg. Third, went into the wished-for woods at last, with empty belts and point-on bayonets; went through them, and saw the sun beyond, and broken lines running across open fields. Some thirty of them came back and sat down by the white building gloomily. The captain looked them over and hummed. "The Campbells are coming—trala, trala." The sun dropped low. The throb of the guns down the valley grew slower, duller, fainter. Sanitary men with stretchers pushed to and fro in the corn. The woods grew dark, the fields dusky. Campfires crackled beside the road, Company B's by the white building. Tin cups were poked into the coals. Conversation was grumbling, fragmentary.
"Jimmie's shut down on pretty sudden."
"Jimmie! There's fifty better men out of this company dropped in their tracks! I don't see why you're so cut on Jimmie."
"I wished it was some one else." The speaker's voice broke. "He was such a damn fool."
"Oh, I see."
"Know the name of that creek?"
"No."
"It's the Antietam."
"What of it? It ain't the Wyantenaug, that's all I care."