Their officers with drawn revolvers refused to
let them.
"Shoot your officers!" a grey man shouted. In a moment every Commander
dropped and the men were marched to the rear.
Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in an endless whirlwind
around this "Bloody Angle." Battle line after battle line rushed in
never to return. Ned saw an oak tree two feet in diameter gnawed down by
musket balls. It fell with a crash, killing and wounding a number of
men.
Color-bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and
fought like demons. Two soldiers, their ammunition spent, choked each
other to death on top of the entrenchment and rolled down its banks
among the torn and mangled bodies that filled the ditch.
In the edge of this red whirlwind Ned Vaughan saw a grim man in grey
standing beside a tree using two guns. His wounded comrade loaded one
while he took deliberate aim and fired the other. With each crack of his
musket a man in blue was falling.
In the centre of this mass of struggling maniacs the men were fighting
with gun swabs, handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists.
The night brought no rest, no pause to succor the wounded or bury the
dead. Through the black murk of the darkness they fought on and on until
at last the men who were living sank in their tracks at three o'clock
before day and neither line had given from this "Bloody Angle.
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