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Muskets fell like two rows of dominoes atop stone walls built on the banks of a quiet creek. Reaching the horizontal they fired, burning eyes with the pungent smoke of spent powder.

Downstream the walls became the rails of a stone bridge. Union and Confederate soldiers converged on foot, shouting as they merged. The fighting deteriorated to bayonet thrusts and even fisticuffs. Here the federals had the greater initial momentum and nearly reached the other side of the bridge before a rebel rally bounced them back.

The boys in blue trod in reverse over a layer of bodies one deep. Some were dead, others writhed with broken bones or lead balls lodged in their innards. A few of the fallen had survived the battle of Shiloh where the war attained a high but stable plateau of savagery. A tube loaded with canister shot was lined up on the long axis of the bridge and mowed down counterattacking rebels like grass to form a second layer of bodies. Some of the fallen boys in gray had survived the artillery hell at Malvern Hill during the Seven Days.

Two guns on the Confederate side of the creek upstream maimed the Union gunners with bursting shells and another fired several rounds of solid shot. The Union gun became a pile of splinters and dented steel. Then followed another Rebel attack. The men in gray gained most of the bridge, which had become an abattoir.

A colonel on the Union side was shot, but to the wonder of his men he stood up again with a lead ball lodged in his Bible. With this apparent divine sanction the colonel led yet another attack. Men standing on the mounting pile of bodies swapped empty muskets for loaded ones handed up to them like water in a fire bucket brigade.

Inevitably the Confederate infantry ran low on gunpowder. They saw the bridge was lost, so they switched to saving their two pieces of artillery, with fresh troops firing in a rearguard action to cover the retreat. The federal general commanding the attack on the bridge saw the retreating gray backs and ordered a lieutenant to report to headquarters that the bridgehead had been secured.

But the junior officer saw the bridge was stacked with bodies and refused to desecrate the dead. Instead the messenger dropped to the creek bed and splashed across the stream on foot, bypassing all the carnage on the bridge. In so doing the officer suffered little hardship. After all, as the local farmers well knew, the water in the creek was only knee deep.