As matters stood, we were now very evenly matched, and how long we might have held out God only knows.  But all at once something appeared to have gone wrong with the enemy’s left; our men had somewhere pierced his line.  A moment later his whole front gave way, and springing forward with fixed bayonets we pushed him in utter confusion back to his original line.  Here, among the tents from which Grant’s people had been expelled the day before, our broken and disordered regiments inextricably intermingled, and drunken with the wine of triumph, dashed confidently against a pair of trim battalions, provoking a tempest of hissing lead that made us stagger under its very weight.  The sharp onset of another against our flank sent us whirling back with fire at our heels and fresh foes in merciless pursuit—­who in their turn were broken upon the front of the invalided brigade previously mentioned, which had moved up from the rear to assist in this lively work.

As we rallied to reform behind our beloved guns and noted the ridiculous brevity of our line—­as we sank from sheer fatigue, and tried to moderate the terrific thumping of our hearts—­as we caught our breath to ask who had seen such-and-such a comrade, and laughed hysterically at the reply—­there swept past us and over us into the open field a long regiment with fixed bayonets and rifles on the right shoulder.  Another followed, and another; two—­three—­four!  Heavens! where do all these men come from, and why did they not come before?  How grandly and confidently they go sweeping on like long blue waves of ocean chasing one another to the cruel rocks!  Involuntarily we draw in our weary feet beneath us as we sit, ready to spring up and interpose our breasts when these gallant lines shall come back to us across the terrible field, and sift brokenly through among the trees with spouting fires at their backs.  We still our breathing to catch the full grandeur of the volleys that are to tear them to shreds.  Minute after minute passes and the sound does not come.  Then for the first time we note that the silence of the whole region is not comparative, but absolute.  Have we become stone deaf?  See; here comes a stretcher-bearer, and there a surgeon!  Good heavens! a chaplain!

The battle was indeed at an end.

XII

And this was, O so long ago!  How they come back to me—­dimly and brokenly, but with what a magic spell—­those years of youth when I was soldiering!  Again I hear the far warble of blown bugles.  Again I see the tall, blue smoke of camp-fires ascending from the dim valleys of Wonderland.  There steals upon my sense the ghost of an odor from pines that canopy the ambuscade.  I feel upon my cheek the morning mist that shrouds the hostile camp unaware of its doom, and my blood stirs at the ringing rifle-shot of the solitary sentinel.  Unfamiliar landscapes, glittering with sunshine or sullen with rain, come to me demanding recognition, pass, vanish and give place to others.  Here in the night stretches a wide and blasted field studded with half-extinct fires burning redly with I know not what presage of evil.  Again I shudder as I note its desolation and its awful silence.  Where was it?  To what monstrous inharmony of death was it the visible prelude?