admiration.  He seemed to think, however, that the men exposed themselves unnecessarily.  When they got near the coulee in skirmishing order, they fired while lying prostrate, but some of them either through nervousness or a desire to get nearer the unseen enemy, kept rising to their feet, and the moment they did so Dumont’s men dropped them with bullets or buckshot.  The rebels, on the other hand, kept low.  They loaded, most of them having powder and shot bags below the edge of the ravine or behind the thicket, and then popped up for an instant and fired.  They had not time to take aim except at the outset, when the troops were advancing.

Meanwhile the right wing had gone into action also.  Two guns of “A” Battery, under Capt.  Peters, dashed up at 10:40 o’clock, and at once opened on the coulee.  A couple of old barns far back to the right were knocked into splinters at the outset, it being supposed that rebels were concealed there; and three haystacks were bowled over and subsequently set on fire by the shells or fuses.  Attention was then centred on the ravine.  At first, however, the battery’s fire had no effect, as from the elevation on which the guns stood, the shot went whizzing over it.  Dumont had sent thirty men to a small bluff, covered with boulder and scrub, within 450 yards of the battery, and these opened a sharp fire.  The battery could not fire into this bluff without running the risk of killing some of the 90th, who had worked their way up towards the right of it.  Several men of “A” were struck here.  The rebels saw that their sharpshooters were causing confusion in this quarter, and about twenty of them ran clear from the back of the ravine past the fire of “C” and “D” companies to the bluff, and joined their comrades in a rattling fusillade on “A.”  Fortunately, only a few of them, had Winchesters.  “A” moved forward a little, and soon got the measure of the ravine.  The shrapnel screeched in the air, and burst right in among the brush and boulders, smashing the scraggy trees, and tearing up the moss that covered the ground in patches.  The rebels at once saw that the game was up in this quarter, though they kept up a bold front and seldom stopped firing except when they were dodging back into new cover.  In doing this they rarely exposed themselves, either creeping on all fours or else running a few yards in the shelter of the thicket and then throwing themselves flat on the ground again, bobbing up only when they raised their heads and elbows to fire.

The shrapnel was too much for them, and they began to bolt towards the other side of the ravine, where our left wing was peppering them.  This move was the first symptom of weakness they had exhibited, and Gen. Middleton at once took advantage of it and ordered the whole force to close in upon them, his object apparently being to surround them.  The rebel commander, however, was not to be caught in that way.  Instead of bunching all his forces on the left away from the fire of the artillery, he sent only a portion of it there to keep our men busy while the rest filled off to the north, retiring slowly as our two wings closed on them.  Dumont was evidently on the look-out for the appearance of Col.  Montizambert’s force from the other side of the river.