Thorne wondered how any general could have failed to carry sufficient ammunition for a day’s hard fighting, but he bit back the comment. The day was indeed young, and it needed to be, for Burnside’s units were crossing the bridge at a snail’s pace and, once over the river, they lingered aimlessly until staff officers arrived to direct them to their proper places. Burnside’s advance, when it came, would be a slow, grinding assault instead of a lightning strike, and Thorne could only pray that Lee did not choose to retreat before the North’s trap swung ponderously shut. He forced his horse up the steep hill where the rebel defenders had fought for so long and, once at the summit, he stared across an empty landscape of cornfields, shade trees, and pastureland, and, in the heat-hazed distance where it was marked by the dust kicked up by a trail of ambulances going slowly south toward the river, he could see the enemy’s only route home. A rebel skirmisher fired at Thorne and the bullet whipped close beside his ear. Thorne saw the patch of smoke and reckoned the shot had been all of four hundred yards. He raised his hat in ironic salute to a well-aimed near miss, then turned his horse down from the high ground.

The sunken lane at last fell. The Yankees, capturing the road, found they could not cross the track without stepping on the bodies of its defenders, and though those defenders had failed, they had hurt their attackers so hard that the Yankees were in no fit state to advance farther.

The battle, which had burned so fierce, smoldered in the afternoon. Weary men staggered about the plateau that was hung with smoke and smothered with the foul miasma of bodies beginning to rot in the hot sun. Batteries waited for new ammunition, infantry counted their cartridges, and officers counted their men. Units that had started the day five hundred strong were less than a hundred now. The dead possessed the field, while the living searched for water and peered into the eye-stinging smoke for a sign of the enemy.

The rebels were hardest hit. There were no reserves left, not one man, and so Lee made a barrier of artillery to defend Sharpsburg and its single road, which led back to the Confederacy. The guns were just in place when a weary messenger on a tired, dust-stained, and sweat-whitened horse came up the track from the town. Hill’s Light Division had reached the ford. The Confederacy’s last troops were crossing the river and coming north.

The rest of Lee’s army waited. They knew the mauled Yankees were making ready and that soon the blue ranks would appear over the brow of the plateau and the fighting would begin again. The dead who had been searched for ammunition were searched again and the precious cartridges shared out. There was no hot water to clean out the fouled barrels of the rifles, nor any urine, for the men were parched dry by thirst and sweat. They waited.