ed and massed to meet them. Sedgwick was
wounded and his command barely saved from annihilation.

While this struggle raged on the Union right, the center saw a bloodier
tragedy. French and Richardson charged the Confederate position. A
sunken road crossed the field over which they marched. For four tragic
hours the men in gray held this sunken road until it was piled with
their bodies. When the final charge of massed blue took it, they found
to their amazement that but three hundred living men had been holding it
for an hour against the assaults of five thousand. So perfect was the
faith of those gray soldiers in Robert E. Lee they died as if it were
the order of the day. It was simply fate. Their Commander could make no
mistake.

Burnsides swung his reinforced division around the woods and pushed up
the heights against Sharpsburg to cut Lee's only line of retreat. He
forced the thin, gray lines before him through the streets of the
village. On its outer edge he suddenly confronted a mass of men clad in
their own blue uniform.

How had these men gotten here?

He was not long in doubt. The blue line suddenly flashed a red wave
squarely in their faces. It was Jackson's Corps from Harper's Ferry in
their new uniforms. The shock threw the Union men into confusion, a
desperate charge drove them out of Sharpsburg, and Lee's army camped on
the field with the dead.

For fourteen hours five hundred guns and a hundred thousand muskets
thundered and hissed their message of blood. When night fell more than
twenty thousand of our noblest men lay dead and wounded on the field.

Lee skillfully withdrew his army across the Potomac. Safe in Virginia he
rallied his shattered forces while he sent Stuart once more in a daring
ride around McClellan's army.

Again McClellan fell before the genius of Lee. Burnsides was put in his
place.

They met at Fredericksburg. Burnsides, the courtly, polished gentleman,
crossed the Rappahannock River and charged the hills on which Lee's
grim, gray men had entrenched. His magnificent army marched into a death
trap. Lee's batteries had been trained to rake the field from three
directions.

Five times the Union hosts charged these crescent hills and five times
they were rolled back in waves of blood. A fierce freezing wind sprang
up from the North. The desperate Union Commander thought still to turn
defeat into victory and ordered the sixth charge.

The men in blue pulled down their caps and c