It was needed badly enough, as were other kinds:  for the last hour or two of that interminable day Granger’s were the only men that had enough ammunition to make a five minutes’ fight.  Had the Confederates made one more general attack we should have had to meet them with the bayonet alone.  I don’t know why they did not; probably they were short of ammunition.  I know, though, that while the sun was taking its own time to set we lived through the agony of at least one death each, waiting for them to come on.

At last it grew too dark to fight.  Then away to our left and rear some of Bragg’s people set up “the rebel yell.”  It was taken up successively and passed round to our front, along our right and in behind us again, until it seemed almost to have got to the point whence it started.  It was the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard—­even a mortal exhausted and unnerved by two days of hard fighting, without sleep, without rest, without food and without hope.  There was, however, a space somewhere at the back of us across which that horrible yell did not prolong itself; and through that we finally retired in profound silence and dejection, unmolested.

To those of us who have survived the attacks of both Bragg and Time, and who keep in memory the dear dead comrades whom we left upon that fateful field, the place means much.  May it mean something less to the younger men whose tents are now pitched where, with bended heads and clasped hands, God’s great angels stood invisible among the heroes in blue and the heroes in gray, sleeping their last sleep in the woods of Chickamauga.

1898.

THE CRIME AT PICKETT’S MILL

There is a class of events which by their very nature, and despite any intrinsic interest that they may possess, are foredoomed to oblivion.  They are merged in the general story of those greater events of which they were a part, as the thunder of a billow breaking on a distant beach is unnoted in the continuous roar.  To how many having knowledge of the battles of our Civil War does the name Pickett’s Mill suggest acts of heroism and devotion performed in scenes of awful carnage to accomplish the impossible?  Buried in the official reports of the victors there are indeed imperfect accounts of the engagement:  the vanquished have not thought it expedient to relate it.  It is ignored by General Sherman in his memoirs, yet Sherman ordered it.  General Howard wrote an account of the campaign of which it was an incident, and dismissed it in a single sentence; yet General Howard planned it, and it was fought as an isolated and independent action under his eye.  Whether it was so trifling an affair as to justify this inattention let the reader judge.