Many soldiers regarded the aftermath of battles to be even more disturbing than the battles themselves. Some described landscapes so bloody that you could cross them and never touch the ground, walking only upon bodies and body parts. When over 5,000 Confederates fell in the failed attack on Malvern Hill in Virginia in 1862, a Union colonel wrote: "A third of them were dead or dying, but enough were alive to give the field a singularly crawling effect."
Those wounded then faced the horrors of pre-modern medicine, including tens of thousands of amputations with unsterilized instruments. Contrary to popular belief, however, that soldiers often bit down on bullets as surgeons did their amputations, opiates were available and widely dispensed. This caused drug addictions.
Nor were bullets and shells the greatest threat to soldiers. Diseases were a lot worse, killing twice as many. Long stretches in crowded and unsanitary camps brought about these deadly diseases, especially dysentery.
--Old Secesh
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