The Confederate

Billy Brady screamed and clutched at the sudden rip in his worn gray sleeve, now stained with red. The Yankee lead bullet fired from a Springfield rifle fifty yards up the hill had been meant for his chest, but the growing darkness made accurate shooting difficult. Case swung his head to the left and anxiously watched as the boy, no more than sixteen years of age, staggered back from the wavering line of hard-pressed Confederate soldiers to join the drift of the wounded making their way back to the retreating lines of their comrades. The delaying action the unit was engaged in was allowing the rest of the brigade to get away to Sharpsburg. The Union forces, vastly superior in numbers, had pushed them back off the ridge of the pass they were trying to hold and now they were giving ground downhill. Bodies marked their retreat and their line had shrunk as their casualties mounted. Most of them, like Billy, were merely wounded, and these men made their way as best they could down to the surgeons or along the road to Sharpsburg where the retreating Army of Northern Virginia was heading. "Hold firm!" Sergeant Case Rafferty Lonnergan screamed, frantically ramming yet another lead bullet down the barrel of his rifled musket. The men of his platoon, part of 'J' company of the 1st Virginia infantry regiment, grimly stood and kept on firing as the advancing blue uniforms closed in. To their left the South Carolinians of General Evans' brigade were firing rapidly against the Pennsylvanians, the same who were pushing the Virginians back. To the right the sound of shooting had worryingly passed behind them, a sign that the exhausted Alabamians there had almost collapsed. He fumbled in the small leather pouch on his belt and withdrew another small percussion cap. He fitted it to the nipple of the musket and fully cocked the hammer. Case glanced once more up at the darkening sky. Night was almost upon them. Ammunition was running out