The peculiar, piercingly loud noise the advancing men made was something neither rebel nor Union troops had heard before, and whose exact inspiration is unknown. It was the implausible result of each man giving a sequence of three sounds that registered somewhere between the screech of a bird and the bark of a fox: a short, high-pitched yelp, followed by a short, lower-pitched bark, followed by a long, high-pitched yelp. Collectively, the noise sounded feral, unearthly, and inhuman, like an ululation from the pit of hell. It would become the stuff of Union nightmares throughout the war. As one
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