A staff officer shouted for Swynyard’s brigade to form up in the wood. Swynyard himself was talking to a grim-faced General Jackson. The colonel nodded, then ran toward his men. “The Yankees are in the church again,” he explained grimly.

The brigade stumbled south through the trees, too tired to speak, too dry-mouthed to curse, going to where more Yankees waited to kill and be killed.

And it was still only morning.

Colonel Thorne watched grimly as General McClellan tried to understand the messages that arrived from across the creek. One dusty messenger spoke only of defeat, of a horde of rebels destroying General Sumner’s troops in the far woods, while other aides brought urgent requests for reinforcements to exploit successful attacks. McClellan met all the messengers with the same stern face with which he had learned to hide his uncertainties.

The Young Napoleon was doing his best to understand the battle from his view across the creek. It had seemed simple enough in the dawn: His men had attacked again and again until at last the rebels had been pushed out of the nearer woods, but in the last hour everything had become confused. Like a spreading forest fire, the battle was now raging across two miles of countryside and from some places the news was all good and from others it was disastrous, and none made sense. McClellan, still fearing Lee’s masterstroke that would destroy his army, was holding back his reserves, though now a sweaty, dust-covered messenger was begging him to send every man available to support General Greene, who had recaptured the Dunker church and was holding it against every counterattack. McClellan, in truth, was not too sure where the Dunker church was. General Greene’s messenger was promising that a successful attack could split the rebel army in two, but McClellan doubted the optimism. He knew that General Sumner’s corps was in desperate trouble to the north of the church, while to the south there was a maelstrom of fire erupting in the bare fields. That fire was sucking in every new brigade that crossed the creek. “Tell Greene he’ll be supported,” McClellan promised, then promptly forgot the promise as he tried to discover what was happening to the far south, where General Burnside was supposed to be across the creek by now and advancing on the rebels’ single road to retreat.

But, before General Burnside could cut that retreat, he first had to cross a twelve-foot-wide stone bridge, and the bridge was guarded by rebel marksmen well dug into the steep slope on its western bank, and General Burnside’s men were piling in heaps of dead as they tried to storm the crossing. Again and again they rushed the bridge, and again and again the rebel bullets turned the leading ranks into quivering heaps of bloody men who lay in the broiling sun and cried for help, for water, for any relief from their misery. “General Burnside can’t get his men over the Rohrbach Bridge,” a messenger admitted to General McClellan. “It’s too closely defended, sir.”