Whatever had been the straggling on the march, none of the commanders complained of any flinching after the fight began. They saw veterans taking, relinquishing, and retaking ground that was soaked with blood and covered with dead; and they saw green regiments "go to their graves like beds." There had been a call for more troops by the National Administration after the battles on the peninsula, which was responded to with the greatest alacrity, men of all classes rushing to the recruiting-offices to enroll themselves. It was a common thing for a regiment of a thousand men to be raised, equipped, and sent to the front in two or three weeks. Some of those new regiments were suddenly introduced to the realities of war at Antietam, and suffered frightfully. For example, the Sixteenth Connecticut, which there fired its muskets for the first time, went in with 940 men, and lost 432. On the other side, Lawton's Confederate brigade went in with 1,150 men, and lost 554, including five out of its six regimental commanders, while Hays's lost 323 out of 550, including every regimental commander and all the staff officers. An officer of the Fiftieth Georgia Regiment said in a published letter: "The Fiftieth were posted in a narrow path, washed out into a regular gully, and were fired into by the enemy from the front, rear, and left flank. The men stood their ground nobly, returning their fire until nearly two-thirds of their number lay dead or wounded in that lane. Out of 210 carried into the fight, over 125 were killed and wounded in less than twenty minutes. The slaughter was horrible! When ordered to retreat, I could hardly extricate myself from the dead and wounded around me. A man could have walked from the head of our line to the foot on their bodies. The survivors of the regiment retreated very orderly back to where General Anderson's brigade rested. The brigade suffered terribly. James's South Carolina battalion was nearly annihilated. The Fiftieth Georgia lost nearly all their commissioned officers." The First South Carolina Regiment, which went into the fight with 106 men, had but fifteen men and one officer when it was over. A Confederate battery, being largely disabled by the work of sharp-shooters, was worked for a time, at the crisis of the fight, by General Longstreet and members of his staff acting as gunners. Three generals on each side were killed. Those on the National side were Generals Joseph K. Mansfield, Israel B. Richardson, and Isaac P. Rodman; those on the Confederate side were Generals George B. Anderson, L. O'B. Branch, and William E. Starke. The wounded generals included on the one side Hooker, Sedgwick, Dana, Crawford, and Meagher; on the other side, R. H. Anderson, Wright, Lawton, Armistead, Ripley, Ransom, Rhodes, Gregg, and Toombs.