In the night the wounded cried. Some died. Flickering campfires showed where the armies rested, the small flames marking the advances the Yankees had made during the day’s long fight. The North and East Woods were theirs, and all the field that lay between the creek and the high ground above the town, but the rebels had not broken, they had not fled. The Light Division, sweating from its aching march, had struck Burnside’s flank and hurled his carefully composed columns back just when they had thought they had broken through to the town.

Confederate Provosts searched the town’s wooden houses for men who had taken refuge from the fighting. They rousted the fugitives from cellars and attics, from cowsheds and springhouses, then marched them back to their units. A child, killed by a Yankee shell that had screamed over the ridge to plunge into Sharpsburg, lay in her best frock on a parlor table. A house burned, its stone chimney stack all that was left when the sun rose above the Red Hill on the Thursday morning. The plateau was still hung with a haze of smoke and by the stench of the dead that lay in ghastly windrows across the fire-scorched fields.

All night men had trickled back to Swynyard’s Brigade so that now there were 112 men left in Faulconer’s Legion and seventy eight in Starbuck’s battalion. When the rising sun dazzled them they shaded their eyes and stared east from the woods close to the Dunker church and waited for the Yankees to attack. But the Yankees did not come. Instead, an hour after dawn, a man rode across the field with a white flag and sought permission from the rebels to rescue the Federal wounded, who lay crying in the bloody fields. Men who had cursed and killed the day before now joined together to disentangle the dead from the dying. Yankee and rebel worked together, filling the ambulances with broken men. The first shallow graves were dug, though it seemed that all the digging in the world would prove unequal to the task of burying the dead.

Captain Truslow decided to doctor Starbuck. There were no surgeons to spare for lightly wounded men, so Truslow used a rusty pair of long-nosed pliers to take out the scraps of tooth and bone. He lay Starbuck flat and stooped over the mangled mouth. “God in his heaven,” he complained when Starbuck flinched at the pain. “Worse than a girl, you are. Just lie still, for Christ’s sake. Water!”

Lieutenant Potter poured water from a bucket to swill the blood from Starbuck’s open mouth. Truslow probed again, swilled out the blood once more, then kept digging and tugging until he was sure every loose scrap of bone and tooth was free. He put three crude stitches into Starbuck’s cheek. “This’ll take the gloss off your good looks,” Truslow said happily, knotting the cotton thread.

“Women like a scar,” Potter said.

“He did enough caterwauling without a scar,” Truslow growled, “so God help the ladies now.” He had found a small bottle of brandy on a dead Yankee and he poured the raw spirit into Starbuck’s bloody mouth. “Swill it out,” he said, then gave Starbuck a pad made from a folded strip torn from the bottom of a dead man’s shirt. “Bite on that till it stops bleeding,” he ordered.