[199]
‘Far off the river lay Antietam creek in 1862’: Burnside's bridge—where the fighting raged Thus the placid stream flowed on to join the far Potomac after the sanguinary battle sung by Gassaway in The pride of Battery B. In neither the white sunlight falling upon the pillars nor the cool reflection of the foliage is there a suggestion of the death and wounds suffered by nearly 25,000 men in Blue and Gray. Around this very spot some of the hottest fighting raged. Along the hills on either side of the stream were ranged hundreds of guns. All through the first day of the battle, September 16, 1862, they volleyed and thundered at each other across the narrow valley. Both Union and Confederate armies were well supplied with artillery, which was so well served that every one tried to keep behind the crests of the ridges. At the termination of this long-continued duel, the incident of little Jane's visit to the Union battery is described by Gassaway as occurring in the vicinity of the peaceful scene here reproduced, from a photograph taken a few days after the battle.
This text is part of:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.