Color-bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and fought like demons. Two soldiers, their ammunition spent, choked each other to death on top of the entrenchment and rolled down its banks among the torn and mangled bodies that filled the ditch.
In the edge of this red whirlwind Ned Vaughan saw a grim man in grey standing beside a tree using two guns. His wounded comrade loaded one while he took deliberate aim and fired the other. With each crack of his musket a man in blue was falling.
In the centre of this mass of struggling maniacs the men were fighting with gun swabs, handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists.
The night brought no rest, no pause to succor the wounded or bury the dead. Through the black murk of the darkness they fought on and on until at last the men who were living sank in their tracks at three o'clock before day and neither line had given from this "Bloody Angle."
The rain ceased to fall, the clouds lifted and the waning moon came out.
Ned Vaughan passing over the outer field saw a long line of men lying in regular ranks in an odd position. He turned to the Commander.
"Why don't you move that line of battle now to make it conform to your own?"
"They're all dead men," was the quiet answer. "They are Georgia soldiers."
John Vaughan, on the other side, crossing an open space, came on a blue battle line asleep rank on rank, skirmishers in front and battle line behind, all asleep on their arms. There was no one near to answer a question. They were all dead.
The blue and grey men were talking to one another now.