osition with reckless valor. A sunken road lay across the
field over which they rushed. For four terrible hours the men in grey
held this sunken road until it was piled with their bodies, and when the
last charge of the resistless blue lines took it, they found but three
hundred living men who had been holding it against the assaults of five
thousand--and "Bloody Lane" became immortal in American history.

It was now one o'clock and the men had fought almost continuously since
the sun rose. The infantry fire slowly slackened and ceased in the Union
right and centre.

Burnside, who held the Union left, was ordered to advance by the
capture of the stone bridge over the Antietam. But a single brigade
under General Toombs guarding this bridge held an army at bay and it was
one o'clock before the bridge was captured.

Burnside now pushed his division up the heights against Sharpsburg to
cut Lee's line of retreat. The Confederates held their ground with
desperate courage, though outnumbered here three to one. At last the
grey lines melted and the men in blue swept triumphantly through the
village and on its edge suddenly ran into a line of men clad in their
own blue uniform.

They paused in wonder. How had their own men gotten in such a position?
They were not left long in doubt. The blue line suddenly blazed with
long red waves of flame squarely in their faces. It was Hill's division
of Jackson's corps from Harper's Ferry. The ragged men had dressed
themselves in good blue suits from the captured Federal storehouse. The
shock threw the Union men into confusion and a desperate charge of the
strange blue Confederates drove them back through the village, and night
fell with its streets still held by Lee's army.

For fourteen hours five hundred pieces of artillery and more than one
hundred thousand muskets had thundered and hissed their cries of death.
On the hills and valleys lay more than twenty thousand men killed and
wounded.

Lee's little army of thirty-seven thousand had been cut to pieces,
having lost fourteen thousand. He had but twenty-three thousand left.
McClellan had lost twelve thousand, but had seventy-five thousand left.
And yet so desperate had been the deadly courage with which the grey
tattered army had fought that McClellan lay on his arms for three days.

The day's work had been a drawn battle, but the President's heart was
broken as he watched in anguish the withdrawal of Lee's army in safety
across