The sound of the great guns now came in regular throbbings—­the strong, full pulse of the fever of battle.  The flag flapped excitedly, shaking out its blazonry of stars and stripes with a sort of fierce delight.  Toward the knot of officers in its shadow dashed from somewhere—­he seemed to have burst out of the ground in a cloud of dust—­a mounted aide-de-camp, and on the instant rose the sharp, clear notes of a bugle, caught up and repeated, and passed on by other bugles, until the level reaches of brown fields, the line of woods trending away to far hills, and the unseen valleys beyond were “telling of the sound,” the farther, fainter strains half drowned in ringing cheers as the men ran to range themselves behind the stacks of arms.  For this call was not the wearisome “general” before which the tents go down; it was the exhilarating “assembly,” which goes to the heart as wine and stirs the blood like the kisses of a beautiful woman.  Who that has heard it calling to him above the grumble of great guns can forget the wild intoxication of its music?

II

The Confederate forces in Kentucky and Tennessee had suffered a series of reverses, culminating in the loss of Nashville.  The blow was severe:  immense quantities of war material had fallen to the victor, together with all the important strategic points.  General Johnston withdrew Beauregard’s army to Corinth, in northern Mississippi, where he hoped so to recruit and equip it as to enable it to assume the offensive and retake the lost territory.

The town of Corinth was a wretched place—­the capital of a swamp.  It is a two days’ march west of the Tennessee River, which here and for a hundred and fifty miles farther, to where it falls into the Ohio at Paducah, runs nearly north.  It is navigable to this point—­that is to say, to Pittsburg Landing, where Corinth got to it by a road worn through a thickly wooded country seamed with ravines and bayous, rising nobody knows where and running into the river under sylvan arches heavily draped with Spanish moss.  In some places they were obstructed by fallen trees.  The Corinth road was at certain seasons a branch of the Tennessee River.  Its mouth was Pittsburg Landing.  Here in 1862 were some fields and a house or two; now there are a national cemetery and other improvements.

It was at Pittsburg Landing that Grant established his army, with a river in his rear and two toy steamboats as a means of communication with the east side, whither General Buell with thirty thousand men was moving from Nashville to join him.  The question has been asked, Why did General Grant occupy the enemy’s side of the river in the face of a superior force before the arrival of Buell?  Buell had a long way to come; perhaps Grant was weary of waiting.  Certainly Johnston was, for in the gray of the morning of April 6th, when Buell’s leading division was en bivouac near the little town of Savannah, eight