Antietam

We learned how bad it could get that fall in Maryland.
Sharpsburg, I know now. We knew it as hell.

The smell of blood and gunpowder stuck around another fifty years for those boys who lived. The rest of them - well, they're still there. There's north and south, there's dead and there's alive, but they're all jumbled and askew, can't much tell one from another.

Old men come. Young ones, too. They look agog, then they drive off. I guess they can say they've been to Antietam, where more died on one day than can be civil. But they can't really. We can.

They brought photographers by the wagonload just after. When they first arrived the scoundrels jockeyed for position to get the most dead in the lens, 'till they began to wander off and find plenty enough to go around.
It turned mighty quiet then.

How do you bury 23,000 in a day? Truth be known, you don't. You wait for the crows and buzzards and picture takers to get through.