The configuration of the ground offered us no protection.  By lying flat on our faces between the guns we were screened from view by a straggling row of brambles, which marked the course of an obsolete fence; but the enemy’s grape was sharper than his eyes, and it was poor consolation to know that his gunners could not see what they were doing, so long as they did it.  The shock of our own pieces nearly deafened us, but in the brief intervals we could hear the battle roaring and stammering in the dark reaches of the forest to the right and left, where our other divisions were dashing themselves again and again into the smoking jungle.  What would we not have given to join them in their brave, hopeless task!  But to lie inglorious beneath showers of shrapnel darting divergent from the unassailable sky—­meekly to be blown out of life by level gusts of grape—­to clench our teeth and shrink helpless before big shot pushing noisily through the consenting air—­this was horrible!  “Lie down, there!” a captain would shout, and then get up himself to see that his order was obeyed.  “Captain, take cover, sir!” the lieutenant-colonel would shriek, pacing up and down in the most exposed position that he could find.

O those cursed guns!—­not the enemy’s, but our own.  Had it not been for them, we might have died like men.  They must be supported, forsooth, the feeble, boasting bullies!  It was impossible to conceive that these pieces were doing the enemy as excellent a mischief as his were doing us; they seemed to raise their “cloud by day” solely to direct aright the streaming procession of Confederate missiles.  They no longer inspired confidence, but begot apprehension; and it was with grim satisfaction that I saw the carriage of one and another smashed into matchwood by a whooping shot and bundled out of the line.

X

The dense forests wholly or partly in which were fought so many battles of the Civil War, lay upon the earth in each autumn a thick deposit of dead leaves and stems, the decay of which forms a soil of surprising depth and richness.  In dry weather the upper stratum is as inflammable as tinder.  A fire once kindled in it will spread with a slow, persistent advance as far as local conditions permit, leaving a bed of light ashes beneath which the less combustible accretions of previous years will smolder until extinguished by rains.  In many of the engagements of the war the fallen leaves took fire and roasted the fallen men.  At Shiloh, during the first day’s fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture.  I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved.  My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity.