g the field of Antietam and the
surrounding country, as they appeared after the great battle of the 17th
of September. These terrible mementos of one of the most sanguinary
conflicts of the war we owe to the enterprise of Mr. Brady of New York. We
ourselves were on the field upon the Sunday following the Wednesday when
the battle took place. It is not, however, for us to bear witness to the
fidelity of views which the truthful sunbeam has delineated in all their
dread reality. The photographs bear witness to the accuracy of some of our
own sketches in a paper published in the December number of this magazine.
The "ditch" is figured, still encumbered with the dead, and strewed, as we
saw it and the neighboring fields, with fragments and tatters. The
"colonel's gray horse" is given in another picture just as we saw him
lying.

Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of
illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps
or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday. How dear to
their little circles far away most of them!--how little cared for here by
the tired party whose office it is to consign them to the earth! An
officer may here and there be recognized; but for the rest--if enemies,
they will be counted, and that is all. "80 Rebels are buried in this hole"
was one of the epitaphs we read and recorded. Many people would not look
through this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors,
would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt
those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting
the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by
the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and
wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet
as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly
represented. Yet war and battles should have truth for their delineator.
It is well enough for some Baron Gros or Horace Vernet to please an
imperial master with fanciful portraits of what they are supposed to be.
The honest sunshine

"Is Nature's sternest painter, yet the best";

and that gives us, even without the crimson coloring which flows over the
recent picture, some conception of what a repulsive, brutal, sickening,
hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we
give the name of armies. The en