From behind their fortifications soldiers could pour out such a volume of fire that there was no chance for a successful massed attack—unless complete surprise could be achieved or overwhelming numbers brought against a weak part of the enemy’s line. Much of the fighting was therefore done by small patrols and snipers, especially in heavily wooded country such as the area around New Hope Church and Kennesaw Mountain. The soldier who died in battle could expect no elaborate funeral. Usually the armies were too busy to do more than bury the dead as quickly as possible and they would probably be put in a mass grave near the place where they had fallen. Later the bodies might be exhumed and moved to a cemetery where they would be listed as “unidentified” and reinterred in a numbered but nameless grave. The soldier who was wounded or who was disabled by disease suffered greatly. As a rule, the Northerner who was sent to an army hospital fared better than his opponent because the Federals were better equipped and provisioned than the Confederates. Field hospitals treated men whose wounds were either very slight or too serious to permit further movement. Others were sent by wagon and rail to hospitals in the rear—Rome, Chattanooga, and Knoxville for the Federals; Atlanta and the small towns along the railroads south of that city for the Southerners. Transportation in crowded hospital wagons over rutted roads or in slow hospital trains was an indescribable horror. The hospitals themselves were better but, by modern standards, uncomfortable and dirty. For painful operations, Northern soldiers often enjoyed the blessing of chloroform. Many Southerners, however, especially those in the hospitals in smaller towns, frequently endured major surgery without the benefit of any opiate except, perhaps, whiskey. In such cases the hospitals echoed with the screams of men undergoing amputations or such treatments as that calling for the use of nitric acid to burn gangrene out of their wounds. [Illustration: {uncaptioned}] No precise figures as to the number of men who were killed, wounded, or sick during the campaign are available. However, it is known that for the war as a whole, disease killed about twice as many men as did the weapons of the enemy. Sickness brought on by exposure and unsanitary camps undoubtedly accounted for many lives among the soldiers in Georgia. Diseases that were especially common were smallpox, scurvy, dysentery, diarrhea (also known as “dierear” and the “Tennessee quick step”), and various types of fevers.