“That’s all he wants to know.”

As Harry rode back he saw that the first fires were spreading, passing over new portions of the battlefield.  Sparks flew in myriads and fine, thin ashes were mingled with the powder smoke.  The small trees, burnt through, fell with a crash, and the flames ran as if they were alive up boughs.  Other trees fell too, cut through by cannon balls, and some were actually mown down by sheets of bullets, as if they had been grass.

His way now led through human wreckage, made all the more appalling by an approaching twilight, heavy with fumes and smoke, and reddened with the cannon and rifle blaze.  His frightened horse pulled wildly at the bit, and tried to run away, but Harry held him to the path, although he stepped more than once in hot ashes and sprang wildly.  The dead were thick too and Harry was in horror lest the hoof of his horse be planted upon some unheeding face.

He knew that the day was waning fast and that the dark was due in some degree to the setting sun, and not wholly to the smoke and ashes.  Yet the fury of the battle was sustained.  The southern left maintained the ground that it had gained, and in the center and right it could not be driven back.  It became obvious to Grant that Lee was not to be beaten in the Wilderness.  His advance suffered from all kinds of disadvantages.  In the swamps and thickets he could mass neither his guns nor his cannon.  Communications were broken, the telegraph wires could be used but little and as the twilight darkened to night he let the attack die.

Harry was back with the commander-in-chief, when the great battle of the Wilderness, one of the fiercest ever fought, sank under cover of the night.  It was not open and spectacular like Gettysburg, but it had a gloomy and savage grandeur all its own.  Grant had learned, like the others before him, that he could not drive headlong over Lee, but sitting in silence by his campfire, chewing his cigar, he had no thought, unlike the others, of turning back.  Nearly twenty thousand of his men had fallen, but huge resources and a President who supported him absolutely were behind him and he was merely planning a new method of attack.

In the Southern camp there was exultation, but it was qualified and rather grim.  These men, veterans of many battles and able to judge for themselves, believed that they had won the victory, but they knew that it was by no means decisive.  The numerous foe with his powerful artillery was still before them.  They could see his campfires shining through the thickets, and their spies told them that, despite his great losses, there was no sign of retreat in Grant’s camp.

An appalling night settled down on the Wilderness.  The North American Continent never saw one more savage and terrible.  Twenty thousand wounded were scattered through the thickets and dense shades, and spreading fires soon brought death to many whom the bullets had not killed at once.  The smoke, the mists and vapors gathered into one dense cloud, that hung low and made everything clammy to the touch.