Then, in September, the brigade gained even greater renown at Antietam. At one point the Texans and one other brigade were pitted against two full Union corps. Hood described the event as “the most terrible clash of arms, by far, that has occurred during the war. The two little giant brigades of this [Hood’s] division wrestled with this mighty force, losing hundreds of their gallant officers and men but driving the enemy from his position and forcing him to abandon his guns on our left.”[56] The division’s rear guard action saved the Confederates from near certain annihilation, but at the end of the Antietam campaign only a fraction of the command could still be classed as “effectives.” The Texas Brigade lost five hundred and sixty men out of eight hundred and fifty-four present for duty. The First Texas lost over eighty percent of its original two hundred and twenty-six members.[57] The next large scale action in which the brigade participated was at Gettysburg in July of 1863. During a series of attacks against Little Round Top Mountain, the men found that “as fast as we would break one line of the enemy, another fresh one would present itself, the enemy reinforcing his lines in our front from his reserves.”[58] The fighting became so heated that the First Texas ran out of ammunition and had to resort to emptying the cartridge boxes of fallen comrades and enemy dead. When darkness fell on July 2, members of the command piled rocks in front of themselves to protect their forward positions on the slope of the hill. The Texans continued to hold the right of Lee’s line throughout July 3, while Pickett’s great charge against the Union center was broken and the Southern army was bloodily repulsed. Over four hundred of Hood’s men were casualties in this great battle that marked “the high tide of the Confederacy.”[59]