Some excerpts from Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle by John Michael Priest:

Wounded men writhed upon the ground. Private Tresse (B Co., 125th PA) waited until the last Confederate trampled over him before he picked himself up from among the dead and casually ambled back to his regiment. Private Fred Gerhard (D Co.) scrounged over the corpses behind the battery looking for a new weapon. He "swapped" his piece for a nicer one. While he was at it, he "appropriated" a leather case, containing a knife, fork, and spoon, from a dead Reb, whose eating days were over. He heard a wounded Rebel call out to him. Gerhard asked him what he wanted. The man asked to be put in the shade. Gerhard helped him to his feet and tried to carry the man off. When he discovered, however, that the Reb could not walk because he was partially disemboweled, he laid him back down. He saw no use in dragging a dying man to safety.

One of Tompkins' sergeants shaved the fried brains of a dead Confederate from the muzzle of Thomas M. Aldrich's cannon and kept them for a memento. Aldrich who was unable to leave his gun, dejectedly watched Corporal Jacob Orth (D Co.), whose regiment, the 28th Pennsylvania (with the 111th Pennsylvania) had defended Tompkins' right section from Kershaw's attack, unwrap the standard of the 7th South Carolina from the corpse of the last bearer. (His action won him the Medal of Honor four years later.)

Sergeant Edward Russ (D Co., 125th P A) fell, helpless, near the Hagerstown Pike. When a Confederate bent over him and started to rifle his pockets, Russ assumed

he was going to be bayonetted and robbed. The Reb picked up an ambrotype lying by Russ' side. "Is this yours?" "Yes, that is my dear wife," Russ feebly replied. The Confederate pressed the picture into Russ' hand. He gazed momentarily at the gut shot Yankee before he ran into the fray with Kershaw's men. During the Confederate retreat, six men from D Company chased after the fleeing Confederates and retrieved their sergeant's still warm body. Sergeant Russ defied the surgeon's prediction that he had not long to live. He died an old man.

Captain Penrose Hallowell (D Co., 20th MA) clutched his shattered left arm close to his body and wandered north through the Confederate lines as if they did not exist. Bullets thunked into the trees around him. A minie thudded into the back of a fleeing Union soldier in front of him. As the man flopped to the ground, Hallowell dazedly stumbled past him.

His good friend, Captain Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. (A Co.) lay on the forest floor in a puddle of his own blood. A ball struck him about a fraction of an inch off center in the back of the neck and exited through the front, barely missing his jugular vein and windpipe. He was still alive, but in a great deal of pain.

Captain Morrison (15th VA) fired all the cartridges in a dead man's box and stepped a few yards away from the firing line where he picked up another and rejoined the fighting as was his habit. He shot two rounds and was preparing to fire the third one when something knocked him unconscious. About a minute later, he came around as four of his men lifted him onto a stretcher and started rearward with him. A projectile prostrated the stretcher party. The fragments splattered Charlie Watkins' brains all over Morrison, causing him to release his grip and dump the captain while he struck the ground with a sickening thud. "Billie" Briggs, another stretcher bearer, crashed to the earth with a broken thigh. The third man in the party lost the second and third fingers on a hand and the fourth one was also wounded. Within seconds, several men ran over to carry Morrison off, but he sent them back into the ranks, where they were really needed.

The captain watched the regiment bolt into the woods near the Nicodemus farm, then very slowly hobbled and crawled to one of the huge haymounds near the West Woods. A mess of blood and brains from head to foot, the captain listened to his blood slosh over his feet as it rolled down his pants legs into his boots.