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who sobbed were usually delirious in their pleas for help. The severed arms and legs were stacked against the side of the barn like firewood. The limbs signified the pain and suffering of a war that Newton had opposed from the outset, and they must have made the pretty, abstract words of the Van Dorns and Maurys sound not only hollow, but obscene.
    Conditions were just as horrifying for the Union wounded at the Tishomingo Hotel, where nurses in aprons seemed to Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio to be “colored in blood from their necks to their hems.” Carlisle was fortunate; a Minié ball had struck his bayonet before ricocheting into his thigh. His bayonet was bent into a circle, but his thighbone was undamaged. A surgeon fingered the wound, stuffed some cloth into it, and poured cold water on it. It was all the treatment he got—three days later, he would pull the dressing out himself.
    After the battle, Carlisle lay on the floor of the hotel near the amputating table and watched the surgeons operate through the night.
    “They would cut off an arm or leg, take it by the thumb or toe, and pitch it over the porch into the street,” he wrote.
    October 4, 1862, 4:00 a.m., Corinth
    In the Confederate fields , men hardly slept. While the surgeons worked and the wounded groaned, Van Dorn and his generals plotted their movements for the following day. The rebels listened to the faint noises coming from the Union fortifications just a few hundred yards away—muffled voices, the creaking of wheels, hammering, the clanking of gear—and wondered what they meant.
    The ever-confident Buck Van Dorn was sure that the noise meant the Yankees were evacuating. But his officers weren’t convinced. Theman in charge of the brigade to which the 7th Battalion belonged, General Green, had a more sensible impression. “What made me doubt they were evacuating was the chopping of timber,” Green said. “There was a difference of opinion among the officers with whom I discussed the matter. I also doubted they were evacuating because I heard the cars coming in twice and a shout on their arrival.” In fact, the Yankees were digging deeper rifle pits, piling more obstacles in front of the batteries, and shifting men as reinforcements arrived via train.
    Van Dorn, however, was certain he could take the town with a swift early-morning assault before it was fully reinforced. He ordered a coordinated wave of attack on the city’s irregularly shaped horseshoe of inner batteries. The main thrust would be a sweeping roundhouse charge from the right, led by Newton’s divisional commander, General Louis Hébert, who was to launch the 1st Division at daylight in force, including the 7th Mississippi Battalion. The left would be led by Dabney Maury, whose troops would make a shorter, more straightforward thrust toward the town as soon as he heard rolling fire from Hébert’s men. As a prelude, there would be an intense predawn artillery bombardment.
    At 4:00 a.m., under a waning moon, the rebels opened up their guns. Fire blossomed from the cannon muzzles, and for a few moments, paralyzed with awe, men followed the courses of the cannonballs by their flaring, hissing fuses. Blasts of color irradiated the black sky with an eerie beauty. “A more pleasant sight one cannot imagine,” wrote a Missouri volunteer named Nehemiah Davis Starr. “We could see the flash of their cannon … then hear the report and trace the coming shell by their light over the tops of the trees until they exploded.” To a Union brigadier, “The different calibers, metals, shapes, and distances of the guns caused the sounds to resemble the chimes of old Rome when all her bells rang out.”
    But the stargazing turned to fatal horror as the artillery found its range, guided by the Yankee campfires. Messmates were just cooking their breakfasts, frying salt pork or hanging kettles of coffee toboil by baling wire, as the shells began to keen. Seconds later explosions gouged bloody