The sun is now behind the halted line of blue; the bayonets, catching the light, make a sea of liquid, mirror-like rivulets hovering in the air, with the bushy branches of pine rising like green isles in the shimmering tide.  The men are filling their cartridge-boxes; new regiments are gliding into the gaps where death has cut the widest swath.  From the woods, cries, groans, commands, clashing steel as the men hustle against each other in the rush into line, prelude the Vulcan clamor soon to begin.  Men, bent, sometimes crawling, with stretchers on their shoulders, glide through the maimed and shrieking fragments of bodies, picking out here and there those seeming capable of carriage.  Other men, prone on their faces, hold canteens of tepid, muddy water—­but ah! a draught to the feverish lips which seems godlike nectar.  Against the stout bodies of the trees, armless men, legless trunks, the maimed in every condition of death’s fantastic sport, hold themselves limply erect, to gain succor or save some of the vital stream pouring from their gaping wounds.

Couriers dash up to the impassive chief, calm-eyed, keen, alert, surveying the line, dispatching brief commands, receiving reports.  It is Franklin.  With the air of a marshal on a civic pageant, perplexed only by some geometrical problem denying the possibility of two right lines on the same plane, he glances upward toward the brow of the plateau.  The four flags had been increased by half a dozen.  Ah, they have received aid!  A tremendous crash comes from the left.  That must be Sherman.  He is on the rebel rear.  One strong pull, and the two bodies will be united, his left arm reaching Sherman’s right.  The shining mirage of steel above the green isle sinks.  The clash of hurtling accoutrements comes up musically, tranquilly from the low ground.  The blue mass, first deliberately, then in a quiet, regular run, passes like a moving barricade up the sloping hillside.  Then from one end of the long wall to the other white puffs as of some monster breathing spasmodically.

The air is a blur of sulphurous blackness.  The bullets are as thick as if a swarm of leaden locusts had been routed from the foliage, and taken wing hillward.  Then behind, through the gaps in the trees, big, whining, screeching swarms of another caliber shells fly over the wall of blue.  In a moment the ground of the plateau is torn, the red clay flying far into the air.  But now the blue wall is girdling the very crest of the hill; it stops, shrivels.  Long gaps are cut in its broken surface.  The hillside is dotted with sprawling figures.  The crest is a ragged edge of writhing bodies and struggling limbs.  Forward!  The wall is advancing, but shorter.  It is within reach of the shining guns—­spouting flame and iron in the very face of the dauntless wall.  Then there is a pause.  The smoke hides everything but the maimed and quivering heaps that strive to crawl backward, back to the crest, back to the deeps that are not rest nor security.  The hillside is like a field, covered with sheaved grain—­with a thousand mangled bodies that had been men.