A few inaudible commands from an invisible leader had placed us in order of battle.  But where was the enemy?  Where, too, were the riddled regiments that we had come to save?  Had our other divisions arrived during the night and passed the river to assist us? or were we to oppose our paltry five thousand breasts to an army flushed with victory?  What protected our right?  Who lay upon our left?  Was there really anything in our front?

There came, borne to us on the raw morning air, the long, weird note of a bugle.  It was directly before us.  It rose with a low, clear, deliberate warble, and seemed to float in the gray sky like the note of a lark.  The bugle calls of the Federal and the Confederate armies were the same:  it was the “assembly”!  As it died away I observed that the atmosphere had suffered a change; despite the equilibrium established by the storm, it was electric.  Wings were growing on blistered feet.  Bruised muscles and jolted bones, shoulders pounded by the cruel knapsack, eyelids leaden from lack of sleep—­all were pervaded by the subtle fluid, all were unconscious of their clay.  The men thrust forward their heads, expanded their eyes and clenched their teeth.  They breathed hard, as if throttled by tugging at the leash.  If you had laid your hand in the beard or hair of one of these men it would have crackled and shot sparks.

VI

I suppose the country lying between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing could boast a few inhabitants other than alligators.  What manner of people they were it is impossible to say, inasmuch as the fighting dispersed, or possibly exterminated them; perhaps in merely classing them as non-saurian I shall describe them with sufficient particularity and at the same time avert from myself the natural suspicion attaching to a writer who points out to persons who do not know him the peculiarities of persons whom he does not know.  One thing, however, I hope I may without offense affirm of these swamp-dwellers—­they were pious.  To what deity their veneration was given—­whether, like the Egyptians, they worshiped the crocodile, or, like other Americans, adored themselves, I do not presume to guess.  But whoever, or whatever, may have been the divinity whose ends they shaped, unto Him, or It, they had builded a temple.  This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle.  The fact of a Christian church—­assuming it to have been a Christian church—­giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.

VII