Burnsides swung his reinforced division around the woods and pushed up the heights against Sharpsburg to cut Lee's only line of retreat. He forced the thin, gray lines before him through the streets of the village. On its outer edge he suddenly confronted a mass of men clad in their own blue uniform.
How had these men gotten here?
He was not long in doubt. The blue line suddenly flashed a red wave squarely in their faces. It was Jackson's Corps from Harper's Ferry in their new uniforms. The shock threw the Union men into confusion, a desperate charge drove them out of Sharpsburg, and Lee's army camped on the field with the dead.
For fourteen hours five hundred guns and a hundred thousand muskets thundered and hissed their message of blood. When night fell more than twenty thousand of our noblest men lay dead and wounded on the field.
Lee skillfully withdrew his army across the Potomac. Safe in Virginia he rallied his shattered forces while he sent Stuart once more in a daring ride around McClellan's army.
Again McClellan fell before the genius of Lee. Burnsides was put in his place.
They met at Fredericksburg. Burnsides, the courtly, polished gentleman, crossed the Rappahannock River and charged the hills on which Lee's grim, gray men had entrenched. His magnificent army marched into a death trap. Lee's batteries had been trained to rake the field from three directions.
Five times the Union hosts charged these crescent hills and five times they were rolled back in waves of blood. A fierce freezing wind sprang up from the North. The desperate Union Commander thought still to turn defeat into victory and ordered the sixth charge.
The men in blue pulled down their caps and charged once more into the jaws of death. The lines as they advanced snatched up the frozen bodies of their comrades, carried them to the front, stacked the corpses into long piles for bulwarks, dropped low and fought behind them. In vain. The gray hills roared and blazed, roared and blazed with increasing fury. Darkness came at last and drew a mantle of mercy over the scene.
The men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their dead along the outer line as dummy sentinels and crept through the shadows across the river shattered, broken, crushed. They left their wounded. Through the long hours of the freezing night the pitiful cries came to the boys in gray on the wings of the fierce North winds. They crawled out into the darkness here and there and held a canteen to the lips of a dying foe.