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Accounts of Gettysburg seem never to mention the strong odor which must have hung over the field.

The troops on both sides had been marching for weeks in seasonably hot weather with little opportunity to bathe. As a case in point, the 15th Alabama appears to have had its first bath in weeks sometime after 8 July, when the Army of Northern Virginia reached the security of the old Antietam battlefield; it did not have another until 23 July. During Lee's earlier sojourn north of the Potomac, a resident of Frederick, Maryland, through which the Army of Northern Virginia passed on 10 Sept '62, observed that the Rebs were accompanied by a "penetrating ammoniacal smell," a characteristic which their opponents in Blue undoubtedly shared.

Add to the stench of tens of thousands of unwashed human bodies that of tens of thousands of horses, plus three days accumulated excreta from both species and the progressive decay of thousands of dead men and animals and by 4 July the location of the armies must have been readily discernable from some distance downwind.

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