They waited. Waited till the rebels were just thirty paces off, then loosed a volley that ripped into Hood’s men and silenced the screaming rebel yells in one curt blow. For an instant, an odd, mind-numbing instant, there was a silence on the battlefield as though the wings of death’s angel were sweeping overhead, but then the silence passed as the Pennsylvanians stood up to reload and their ramrods clattered in hot barrels and the Northern guns jarred back on their trails to add more carnage to the slaughter in the corn. The front rank of the Confederates was a horror of writhing bodies, blood, and moans. A man snatched up the fallen banner of Mississippi and was shot down. A second man gripped the flag by its fringe and dragged it back through the corn as the Pennsylvanians fired a second volley that thumped into flesh with brutal force. The flag fell again, riddled with bullets. A third man seized the banner and raised it high, then walked backward from the blazing rifle fire until he was driven down with bullets in his belly, groin, and chest. A fourth man speared the flag on his bayonet and pulled it back to where the survivors of his battalion were forming a crude line to return the Pennsylvanian fire. The space between the two lines seemed to be a shifting mass of dirt, a heaving, crawling pile of giant maggots that blindly struggled to find safety. It was the wounded pushing the dead away and trying to rejoin their comrades.

The right flank of Hood’s attack swept into the East Woods. There, protected by the battered trees from the effects of the Northern guns, the Texans drove into the Yankees, who were advancing southward. Men fought within spitting distance. For a time the two sides traded shots, neither willing to retreat and neither able to advance, but slowly the rebel fire gained the advantage as more men came from the pasture. The Yankees retreated and the retreat became hurried as the rebels pushed forward with bayonets.

Starbuck and his men were weary, bruised, wounded, and parched, but they fought among the trees with the desperation of soldiers who believed that one last effort would rid them of their enemies. Again and again the Yankees had come forward, and again and again they had been pushed back, and this time it seemed as if they could be pushed clear back out of the woods altogether. One group of Northerners turned a pile of cordwood into a miniature redoubt. Their rifle barrels spat long flames over the logpile, the tongues of fire oddly bright in the shadow of the trees. Starbuck used his revolver, firing at murderously close range into the Yankees, who suddenly abandoned the logs as a rush of screaming Texans swept up from their right. A small black dog stayed with its dead master, running back and forth and barking piteously as the rebels ran past. Starbuck unslung his rifle, paused to reload it, then ran on toward the fighting. He came to the road that ran through the woods and crouched at its edge, watching as Yankees dashed across to escape the charge. He fired, saw a man sprawl in the grass that grew down the road’s center, then he sprinted over the dirt road himself. The fight seemed to be dying as the Yankees legged it out of the trees and so he squatted by a limestone knoll and began the laborious business of reloading the revolver.