"Tell General Burnside that I will send him Miller's battery. I have no infantry to spare. He must hold his ground till dark. Tell him if he cannot hold his ground, he may fall back to the bridge; but he must hold that, or all is lost."
Porter's corps and Slocum's division of Franklin's, eighteen thousand men in all, have taken no part in the battle. Smith is holding an important position. He has made one gallant charge, but his troops are ready to fight. There are twenty thousand men which can take the offensive, and nearly a hundred guns of the artillery.[76]
The right flank of the Rebels is all but turned. Wilcox is close upon the town. Rodman has driven Hill, and is holding his ground. Such is the condition of affairs as the sun goes down.
It is useless for Burnside to struggle without supports. He fights till the coming on of twilight, and then recalls his troops.
The regiments of Fairchild's brigade, far up on the hillside, upon ground won from the enemy by their valor, go back reluctantly.
"The men," says Lieutenant-Colonel Kimball, of the Ninth New York, "retired in good order, at a slow step, and with tears in their eyes, at the necessity which compelled them to leave the field they had so dearly won."[77]
It was a necessity. Without reinforcements he could not hold his ground, and Lee could cut him off if he remained so far from the bridge.
The daylight is dying out. Through the hours from early morning the roar of battle has been unceasing. Four hundred cannon have shaken the earth, and nearly two hundred thousand men have struggled for the mastery. At times the storm has lulled a little, like the wind at night, then rising again to the fierceness of a tornado. In the intervals of the cannonade, low moans come up from the hollows, like the wail of the night-wind on a lonely shore.
On the right, through the morning, the fiery surges ebbed and flowed, and dashed to and fro, now against the ledges in the woods, and now against the ridge by Poffenberger's. They have left crimson stains upon the threshold of the church. The sunken road has drunk the blood of thousands. The cornfields, changing from the green of Summer to the russet of Autumn are sprinkled with magenta dyes. The battle is at this hour indecisive, but the artillery of both armies put on new vigor as the sun goes down, as if each was saying to the other, "We are not beaten."
Once more the firing is renewed. Standing on the high hill east of the Antietam, occupied by Porter, I can see almost up to Poffenberger's. The batteries upon the hill in rear of his house are thundering. I can see the glimmer of the flashes, and the great white cloud rising above the trees, by Miller's. And there in the cornfield, Porter's, Williston's, and Walcott's batteries are pounding the ledges behind the church, and sweeping the hillside. The woods which shade the church where Jackson stands, are smoking like a furnace. Richardson's batteries, in front of Lee, are throwing shells into the cornfield beyond Rulet's.