Battle at Dawn

Civil War battles nearly always opened at dawn, and the reason is practical. Black powder produces enormous white smoke, and once several thousand muskets and a few dozen guns have been firing for an hour a field becomes effectively opaque. Commanders needed daylight, and they needed the hours before the smoke closed in, so an attack that started late was an attack that would be fought blind.

So armies were roused around three in the morning, formed up in the dark, and stood in the cold waiting for enough light to see the ground. Soldiers wrote about this part more often than the fighting itself. The waiting was the worst of it: rations untouched, men handing letters and keepsakes to whoever was going to the rear, the strange silence of thousands of people all thinking about the same thing.

Then the mist would lift enough to make out a treeline four hundred yards off, and someone would give an order, and the next several hours would happen too quickly to remember properly afterwards. Almost every veteran account describes the dawn in detail and the battle in fragments.