it was good weather for that:  sleep was in the very atmosphere.  The sun burned crimson in a gray-blue sky through a delicate Indian-summer haze, as beautiful as a day-dream in paradise.  If one had been given to moralizing one might have found material a-plenty for homilies in the contrast between that peaceful autumn afternoon and the bloody business that it had in hand.  If any good chaplain failed to “improve the occasion” let us hope that he lived to lament in sack-cloth-of-gold and ashes-of-roses his intellectual unthrift.

The putting of that army into battle shape—­its change from columns into lines—­could not have occupied more than an hour or two, yet it seemed an eternity.  Its leisurely evolutions were irritating, but at last it moved forward with atoning rapidity and the fight was on.  First, the storm struck Wagner’s isolated brigades, which, vanishing in fire and smoke, instantly reappeared as a confused mass of fugitives inextricably intermingled with their pursuers.  They had not stayed the advance a moment, and as might have been foreseen were now a peril to the main line, which could protect itself only by the slaughter of its friends.  To the right and left, however, our guns got into play, and simultaneously a furious infantry fire broke out along the entire front, the paralyzed center excepted.  But nothing could stay those gallant rebels from a hand-to-hand encounter with bayonet and butt, and it was accorded to them with hearty good-will.

Meantime Wagner’s conquerors were pouring across the breastwork like water over a dam.  The guns that had spared the fugitives had now no time to fire; their infantry supports gave way and for a space of more than two hundred yards in the very center of our line the assailants, mad with exultation, had everything their own way.  From the right and the left their gray masses converged into the gap, pushed through, and then, spreading, turned our men out of the works so hardly held against the attack in their front.  From our viewpoint on the bluff we could mark the constant widening of the gap, the steady encroachment of that blazing and smoking mass against its disordered opposition.

“It is all up with us,” said Captain Dawson, of Wood’s staff; “I am going to have a quiet smoke.”

I do not doubt that he supposed himself to have borne the heat and burden of the strife.  In the midst of his preparations for a smoke he paused and looked again—­a new tumult of musketry had broken loose.  Colonel Emerson Opdycke had rushed his reserve brigade into the melee and was bitterly disputing the Confederate advantage.  Other fresh regiments joined in the countercharge, commanderless groups of retreating men returned to their work, and there ensued a hand-to-hand contest of incredible fury.  Two long, irregular, mutable, and tumultuous blurs of color were consuming each other’s edge along the line of contact.  Such devil’s work does not last long, and we had the great joy to see it