The Sword of Antietam: A Story of the Nation's Crisis

by Joseph A. Altsheler

But he also saw the great line of the Northern Army. It was both deeper and longer than that of the South, and he knew that the men were full of resolve and courage.

“How many have we got here?” Dick heard himself asking Warner.

“Forty or fifty thousand, I suppose,” he heard Warner replying, “and before night there will be eighty thousand. Our line is two miles long now. We ought to wrap around Jackson and crush him to death. Listen to the bugles! What a mellow note! And how they draw men on to death! And listen to the throbbing of the big cannon, too!”

Warner's face was flushed. He had become excited, as the two armies stood there, and looked at each other a moment or two like prize fighters in the ring before closing in battle. Then they heard the order to charge and far up and down the line their own cannon opened with a crash so great that Dick and his comrades could not hear one another talking.

Then they charged. The whole army lifted itself up and rushed at the enemy, animated by patriotism, the fire of battle and the desire for revenge. Among the officers were Milroy and Schenck and others who had been beaten by Jackson in the valley. There, too, was the brigade of Germans whom Jackson had beaten at Cross Keyes. Many of them were veterans of the sternest discipline known in Europe and they longed fiercely for revenge. And there were more Germans, too, under Schurz—hired Germans, fighting nearly a hundred years before to prevent the Union—and free Germans now fighting to save it.

Driven forward thus by all the motives that sway men in battle, the Union army rushed upon Jackson. Confident from many victories and trusting absolutely in their leader the Southern defense received the mighty charge without flinching. The wood now swarmed with riflemen and they filled the air with their bullets, so many of them that their passage was like the continual rush of a hurricane. Along the whole line came the same metallic scream, and the great battery in the center was a volcano, pouring forth a fiery hurricane of shot and shell.

Dick felt their front lines being shorn. Although he was untouched it was an actual physical sensation. He could see but little save that fearful blaze in their faces, and the cries of the wounded and dying were drowned by the awful roar of so many cannon and rifles.

The cloud of dust and smoke had become immense and overwhelming in an instant, but it was pierced always in front by the blaze of fire, and by its flaming light Dick saw the long lines of the Southern men, their faces gray and fixed, as he knew those of his own comrades were.

But the charge, brave, even reckless, failed. The brigades broke in vain on Jackson's iron front. Riddled by the fire of the great battery and of the riflemen they could not go on and live. The Germans had longed for revenge, but they did not get it. The South Carolinians fell upon them at the edge of the wood and hurled them back. They rallied, and charged again, but again they were handled terribly, and were forced back by the charging masses of the Southerners.

Dick had been at Shiloh. He had seen the men of the west in a great battle, and now he saw the men of the east in a battle yet greater. There it had been largely in the forest, here it was mostly in the open, yet he saw but little more. One of the extraordinary features of this battle was dust. Trampled up from the dry fields by fighting men in scores of thousands it rose in vast floating clouds that permeated everything. It was even more persistent than the smoke. It clogged Dick's throat. It stung and burnt him like powder. Often it filled his eyes so completely that for a moment or two he could not see the blaze of the cannon and rifle fire, almost in his face.