Within that defile, barely broad enough for a single gun, were piled the wrecks of no fewer than four.  They had noted the silencing of only the last one disabled—­there had been a lack of men to replace it quickly with another.  The debris lay on both sides of the road; the men had managed to keep an open way between, through which the fifth piece was now firing.  The men?—­they looked like demons of the pit!  All were hatless, all stripped to the waist, their reeking skins black with blotches of powder and spattered with gouts of blood.  They worked like madmen, with rammer and cartridge, lever and lanyard.  They set their swollen shoulders and bleeding hands against the wheels at each recoil and heaved the heavy gun back to its place.  There were no commands; in that awful environment of whooping shot, exploding shells, shrieking fragments of iron, and flying splinters of wood, none could have been heard.  Officers, if officers there were, were indistinguishable; all worked together—­each while he lasted—­governed by the eye.  When the gun was sponged, it was loaded; when loaded, aimed and fired.  The colonel observed something new to his military experience—­something horrible and unnatural:  the gun was bleeding at the mouth!  In temporary default of water, the man sponging had dipped his sponge into a pool of comrade’s blood.  In all this work there was no clashing; the duty of the instant was obvious.  When one fell, another, looking a trifle cleaner, seemed to rise from the earth in the dead man’s tracks, to fall in his turn.

With the ruined guns lay the ruined men—­alongside the wreckage, under it and atop of it; and back down the road—­a ghastly procession!—­crept on hands and knees such of the wounded as were able to move.  The colonel—­he had compassionately sent his cavalcade to the right about—­ had to ride over those who were entirely dead in order not to crush those who were partly alive.  Into that hell he tranquilly held his way, rode up alongside the gun, and, in the obscurity of the last discharge, tapped upon the cheek the man holding the rammer—­who straightway fell, thinking himself killed.  A fiend seven times damned sprang out of the smoke to take his place, but paused and gazed up at the mounted officer with an unearthly regard, his teeth flashing between his black lips, his eyes, fierce and expanded, burning like coals beneath his bloody brow.  The colonel made an authoritative gesture and pointed to the rear.  The fiend bowed in token of obedience.  It was Captain Coulter.

Simultaneously with the colonel’s arresting sign, silence fell upon the whole field of action.  The procession of missiles no longer streamed into that defile of death, for the enemy also had ceased firing.  His army had been gone for hours, and the commander of his rear-guard, who had held his position perilously long in hope to silence the Federal fire, at that strange moment had silenced his own.  “I was not aware of the breadth of my authority,”