164 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



time the most terrible, that came to my personal knowledge was 

 at Antietam, where General Hooker conducted the fight when he 

 received his wound. The Confederates were massed in a field of 

 tall corn, and Hooker ordered his batteries to open on them with 

 canister. In his report he says that the shot cut every stalk of 

 corn in the greater part of the field close to the ground as neatly as 

 though done with a knife. Of course, the men in that field did not 

 escape the biting hail. Neither did they stand like lambs and 

 accept their doom. After the first cannon volley the survivors 

 started toward Hooker's batteries, mounting a rail fence that 

 barred their progress, and just in front of and along this fence 

 several hundred lay dead after the action. The regiment in which 

 I served took position at one end of the fence some hours after- 

 ward, and as this field was between the lines the bodies had not 

 been disturbed. About sundown there was a sort of truce to re- 

 move some of the wounded, and with others I passed along the 

 fence to see the line of the dead. Some of the poor fellows had 

 passed over the fence and begun creeping forward, gun in hand ; 

 some had gained the top of the fence, and death had left them 

 balancing across the rails ; others, in the act of climbing, had 

 died leaning against it or dangling from it head foremost, having 

 passed partly over and been caught by the feet. Generally the 

 sword or musket was held in firm grip, the eyeballs turned for- 

 ward, and every muscle and organ bearing evidence of having 

 been strained to get at the batteries that were making such dread- 

 ful havoc. When I returned to the end of the line and glanced 

 back again at the prostrate column, I said to my comrades who 

 had not gone out to get a close view : " Boys, it is just as it looks 

 from here. Those men were caught at it, and were struck down 

 in the act." It is not to be wondered at that General Hooker 

 was too much absorbed at the time of this fighting to notice 

 his wound. He wrote of the action that the "slain (Confederate) 

 lay in rows precisely as they had stood in the ranks a few 

 moments before." * 



Very, very few of these dead bore the look of having passed 

 away composedly. Yet, on the ordinary battle-field, where the 

 killed outright number but two or three to every hundred of 

 combatants, the exceptions are those who do not die in a quiet- 

 state of mind or body. Men who are cut down in a charge, 

 while the tide of heated action sweeps on, leaving them alone, 

 bend their thoughts at once to themselves, and, if death is felt 

 approaching, turn their faces up to the quiet skies, compose their 



* The scene here described was visible from two o'clock p. m. until sundown from 

 the northern edge of the East Wood along the fence running from the East Wood westerly 

 to the Sharpsburg pike, and separating a corn-field from the elevated cleared field lying 

 south of the Miller farmstead. 



