BRUNSWICK — With beards drawn in crayon and mustaches stuck on with glue, Civil War soldiers marched in time and medics tended the wounded Friday afternoon on the battlefield at Gettysburg — a.k.a. Brunswick’s Crimmins Field.

Students from Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School lit “cannons” that exploded in clouds of baby powder, and parents, teachers and other volunteers donned rudimentary surgeon garb to help amputate wounded limbs.

Amid the chaos of the Brunswick elementary schools’ annual re-enactment of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln — fifth-grade teacher Lou Sullivan — strode across the battlefield and marveled at the decade-old event, which he said each year “has grown just a little bit bigger.”

“It’s been fun watching it evolve,” Sullivan said.

The re-enactment follows intensive study of the Civil War by the entire fifth grade.

Each student selected one activity and researched it thoroughly prior to Friday’s event. By focusing on a specific element, students retain a greater overall sense of the history, according to fifth-grade teacher Blair Dwyer.

Ten-year-old Makayla Carver, who served as a tour guide of the battlefield, explained her three-dimensional map of the Battle of Bull Run, featuring red and blue soldiers, a green figure on a hill “because they liked to have picnics and watch the battle,” and a stone wall for which who Stonewall Jackson was named.

“Her knowledge base is what I would like,” Dwyer said of Carver’s detailed explanation. “The stone wall was the key.”

In the surgery area, assistant Louise Rosen held a saw out to 11-year-old surgeon Alex Studebaker.

“If he’s like any of the others, he has 40 percent chance of survival,” Rosen declared as another wounded soldier arrived on a stretcher. “But we’ll do our best.”

“We have to look for pus and inflammation,” Studebaker explained.

“We think pus means no infection,” surgeon Lizzy Haskell added. “We didn’t know what germs were.”

Nearby, students and adults sat on the ground in a circle playing “Dixie” on various stringed instruments, while off-duty soldiers engaged in games of marbles and cribbage.

After all, said student Dakota Preble, “It’s not like round-the-clock killing.”

At noon, stew prepared by parents was doled into mess kits — tin cans carried around the students’ waists.

“What we love is almost everything we have here is free,” Sullivan said, motioning to hats and uniform jackets “mostly from Goodwill. We haven’t spent a lot of money and it looks like there are soldiers out here.”

Peering out at the Confederate troops preparing for the 1 p.m. staging of Pickett’s Charge, he smiled.

“The kids always rise to the occasion,” he said.

bbrogan@timesrecord.com