Colonel Swynyard was shouting his own name in an attempt to rally his brigade. Handfuls of men joined him, milling in confusion among the woods just north of the Dunker church. Behind them now was a stretch of pastureland that had been turned into hell’s outpost—a swathe of killing ground littered with bodies and slick with blood, a smoke-hung graveyard of the unburied dead over which Yankee battalions advanced in uncoordinated pursuit of the rebel fugitives. Shell bursts punctured the pasture, scattering dead men and hurrying the last rebels toward the West Woods.

Some of the panicking rebels had not stopped in the West Woods, but had kept going into the farmlands beyond. Rebel cavalry were dispatched to round them up and send them back to the West Woods, where officers and sergeants bellowed out unit names. Here and there the vestiges of companies formed, and shattered battalions gathered under their torn and stained colors. Other officers did not worry about rejoining their battalions, but just tugged and pushed men into markeshift companies at the wood’s edge and told them to open fire on the pursuing enemy. A wagon was whipped up the Hagerstown Pike and dropped off boxes of artillery ammunition for the gun teams that had hastily deployed in front of the woods. The wagon’s team was hit by a Yankee shell and dying horses screamed as gallons of their blood washed down the road’s deep ruts. The ground in front of the rebel batteries was at last free of fugitives and the gunners opened fire with canister that dropped more dead among the army of corpses that lay beneath the smoke.

For a moment it seemed as though the guns would hold the Northern advance, then lines of blue troops appeared in the smoke that hazed the land east of the batteries. Gunners desperately tried to handspike the guns about to face this new threat, but then a rippling volley whipped a storm of minie bullets that clanged off cannon barrels, drove splinters from gun wheels, and threw down the gunners. In the pause while the infantry reloaded, the surviving gun captains brought up their horse teams and dragged the guns back through the trees. A Yankee cheer sounded, then a battalion charged into the vacated ground where the grass had been flattened and scorched by the cannon blasts. No one opposed them and the troops, a big Pennsylvanian regiment, found their lodgment in the West Woods. They captured the Dunker church, which was filled with wounded men, and there they stopped, for the woods around them were alive with rebel survivors who began a galling fire. The Pennsylvanian commander sent messengers to the rear with pleas for support and ammunition. Some Northern guns came to help the Pennsylvanian, but the gunners unlimbered too close to the woods and rebel sharpshooters raked them with fire. The guns pulled back, one hauled by infantry because all its horses had been shot. The abandoned wagon had caught fire and its remaining load of shells banged off one by one to vomit a filthy smoke into the white-hot sky.