those guns charged with death looking grimly down upon them and waiting.  On they come, nearer and nearer, and now some are on the hill and begin to climb the steep that forms the defence, slowly and with difficulty, using at times their rifles as aids like alpenstocks.  Not a word is spoken.  It is hard to understand how so many men can move with so little noise.  The silence is that which precedes all dreadful noises.  It is ominous, terrible.  Scarcely twenty feet more, and the foremost will reach the rampart.  Haste! haste!  The day is won!

Suddenly a figure in gray leaps upon the breastwork:  he waves his sword, utters a short quick word of command, and disappears.  It is enough.  The sleeping battery awakes.  The silence becomes hideous uproar.  The smooth green line of the sod against the sky is lined with marksmen, and in an instant fringed with fire.  Then the cannon bellow and the breezeless air is dense with smoke.  The attacking column hesitates, trembles, makes a useless effort to advance, and then falls back beyond the bridge.  The officers endeavor to rally their men and renew the attack at once, but in vain:  flesh and blood cannot stand in such a storm.  Nevertheless, the brave fellows—­God bless their memory!—­halt at length, and form and charge once more.  And so again and again and again; every time in vain and with new losses, until at last they cannot rally, but retreat, broken and bleeding, to the main body of the expedition, carrying with them such of the wounded and dead as they can snatch from under the fire of the rebel riflemen.  Such was the battle of Bloody Bridge, and well was it named.  Five times that gallant regiment charged the battery, and when the smoke of battle cleared away the sun shone down upon a piteous sight—­blood dyeing the green of that sodded escarp—­blood in great clots upon the rocks and stumps of the rugged hill below—­blood poured plenteously upon the dusty road, making it horrible with purple mire—­blood staining the bridge and gathering in little pools upon the planks, and dripping slowly down through the cracks between them into the sluggish stream, where it floated with the water in great red clouds, toward which creatures dwelling in slimy depths below came up lazily, but when they tasted it became furious and fought among themselves like demons—­blood drying in hideous networks and arabesques upon the railing of the bridge—­blood upon the fences, blood upon the trembling leaves of the bushes by the wayside—­blood everywhere!  And everywhere the upturned faces and torn bodies of men who had dared to do their duty and to die:  side by side the white, who led and the black who followed—­all set and motionless, but all wearing the same expression of brave but hopeless determination.  That was a brave charge at Balaklava, but, trust me, there have been Balaklavas that are yet unsung.

So the expedition went back, and its brigades were redistributed to the Sea Islands and to Florida; but why it was ever sent out, and why that regiment was sent forward to take the battery without artillery and without reinforcements, God, who knoweth all things, only knows.  And God alone knows why there must be wars and rumors of wars, and why men made in his image must tear each other like maddened beasts.