GENERAL JOHN HOOD’S DIVISION BURST OUT OF THE West Woods to hit the flank of the attacking Yankees like a tidal wave. Most of Hood’s men were Texans, but he had battalions from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina in his ranks, and all were veterans. They stopped the Yankee advance dead on the turnpike, then spread their battle line across the pasture, where they faced north toward the cornfield. One volley was enough to decimate the Yankees advancing through the corn, then the Texans were screaming the rebel yell and plunging forward with bayonets. Some small groups of Yankees resisted and were cut down, but most just fled. The North’s attack was spent, the rebel counter-attack was surging, and the survivors of the old defense line, the battered, bleeding men from Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia, went forward with Hood’s men.

The Yankee artillery by the North Woods took up the battle. They could not use canister, for the ground in front of them was littered with wounded northerners, and so they cut their shell fuses as short as they dared and opened fire. The shells crashed into the cornfield, flinging men aside and adding a new skein of smoke to the cirrus-like canopy that hung above the trampled crop. The noise reached a new and dreadful intensity. The Northern gunners worked frantically, double-shotting some guns to belch out pairs of shells that exploded a heartbeat after firing. The guns by the turnpike were unhampered by wounded men and they turned their canister on the Texans advancing on the road. One barrel load of bullets ripped up forty feet of snake fence and drove its splintered remnants into a company of rebels. Yankee infantry appeared from the North Woods to add their volley fire, and all the while the rebel cannon lobbed their long-fused shells over the flags of Hood’s Division to harry the Northern gunners.

The Yankee gunners at the northern edge of the cornfield died hard. They tried to keep the fight going, but they were in easy range of the Texan skirmishers and one by one the guns were abandoned. Still the Confederates drove forward, skirting the piles of dead and dying in the cornfield, struggling through the rage of bullet and shell as though they could sweep the Yankees clear up to Hagerstown and beyond. Some officers tried to check their men, knowing they were advancing too far, but no voice could be heard in the tempest of iron and lead. The battle had become a gutter fight, rage against rage, men dying in a cornfield that had become death’s kingdom.

A regiment from Mississippi pursued the broken Yankees toward the northern edge of the broken corn, sure they were chasing shattered troops to utter defeat, but the Yankees had Pennsylvanian infantry waiting at the rail fence. The blue-coated riflemen were lying down, resting their barrels on the fence’s lowest rail. A standing man could see nothing but smoke, but at ground level the waiting infantry could see the legs of the attackers.