In the vicinity of the little Dunker church, the road running northward from Sharpsburg to Hagerstown was bordered on both sides by woods, and in these woods the battle began when Hooker assaulted Jackson at sunrise. There was hard fighting for an hour, during which Jackson's lines were not only heavily pressed by Hooker in front, but at length enfiladed by a fire from the batteries on the eastern side of the Antietam. This broke them and drove them back; but when Hooker attempted {178} to advance his lines far enough to hold the road and seize the woods west of it, he in turn was met by fresh masses of troops and a heavy artillery fire, and was checked. Mansfield's corps was moving up to his support when its commander was mortally wounded. Nevertheless it moved on, got a position in the woods west of the road, and held it, though at heavy cost. At this moment General Hooker was seriously wounded and borne from the field, while Sumner crossed the stream and came up with his corps. His men drove back the defeated divisions of the enemy without much difficulty, and occupied the ground around the church. His whole line was advancing to apparent victory, when two fresh divisions were brought over from the Confederate right, and were immediately thrust into a wide gap in Sumner's line. Sedgwick, whose division formed the right of the line, was thus flanked on his left, and was easily driven back out of the woods, across the clearing, and into the eastern woods, after which the Confederates retired to their own position. Fighting of this sort went on all the forenoon, one of the episodes being a race between the Fifth New Hampshire Regiment and a Confederate force for a commanding point of ground, the two marching in parallel lines and firing at each other as they went along. The New Hampshire men got there first, and, assisted by the Eighty-first Pennsylvania Regiment, from that eminence threw a destructive fire into the ranks of the regiment they had out-run. The fighting around the Dunker church was so fierce, and so much artillery fire was concentrated upon that spot, that when the woods were cut down, years afterward, and the logs sent to a saw-mill, the saws were completely torn to pieces by the metal that had penetrated the wood and been overgrown.