Antietam — Close Encounter

Civil War infantry carried rifled muskets accurate to several hundred yards, and yet a great deal of the killing at Antietam happened at a few dozen paces or less. The reason is the ground: the fighting ran through standing corn, close timber, a sunken farm lane and the smoke of thousands of black-powder weapons that hung in dead air and never cleared.

Men came on each other by surprise, at conversational distance, repeatedly. Regiments fired their first volley into ranks they had not known were there. A soldier in the West Woods described a Confederate line appearing whole out of the smoke at what he judged to be thirty yards, delivering a volley and vanishing again. Officers lost control of their own companies not because the men broke but because nobody could see far enough to command them.

It is why casualty figures for that day are so far out of proportion to the numbers engaged. Around 23,000 men fell in twelve hours across roughly four miles of Maryland farmland, most of them shot by someone close enough to make out the expression on their face.