The brigade was withdrawn from the line which it had faithfully held all day, and some disposition made to fill the gap.  Hazen formed his regiments in close masses, faced them to the right and rear, covered his front with a trusty battalion as skirmishers, waved an adieu to the comrades left behind, and plunged into the unknown forest in the direction of Thomas’s firing.  On and on went the brigade and came nearer and nearer to the ridge which Thomas held.  Suddenly, the skirmishers strike obliquely an opposing line.  They brush it away in an instant, but the warning is not lost.  Keep more to the rear:  no fighting now, though you should whip three to one.  The fate of the four divisions rests upon that.  With quick and steady tread the regiments move on.  They clear the wood at last, climb the end of a ridge through a field of standing corn, and burst into an open field at the summit amid the wild cheers of Thomas’s exhausted men, while Thomas himself, beloved of all the army, rides down to take Hazen by the hand.  And not a moment too soon.

Almost at the very instant Thomas’s skirmishers along the front of the ridge broke out into a rattling fire, and were seen falling back.  The enemy was about to make his final effort, and it was to be against the flank where now lay Hazen’s brigade.  Quickly deploying his regiments, Hazen placed them in four lines, closed one upon another, and the men lay flat upon their faces.  The yell of the enemy was heard in the wood below, and in a moment the declivity in front was covered with the heavy lines of the assailants.  Then the first of Hazen’s regiments was brought to its feet and poured its volley straight into the faces of the oncoming foe.  The next regiment, and the next, and then the last, followed in quick succession.  The echoes of the last volley had hardly died away before the enemy, who came on so confident and so strong, had disappeared, crushed and broken, into the forest, leaving the hillside strewn with his dead and wounded.

So ended the fighting.  Night came down and shrouded the fierce combatants from each other’s sight.

The dusky ranks take up the unfamiliar march with faces from the foe.  Their drums are silent, and their bugles voice-less as the spirit-horns which marshal their heroic dead upon the farther shore.  The shadowy ranks pass on into the night.  Bearing their close-furled banners and their empty guns, they pass on into the sad and silent night of Chickamauga to await the glorious sun of Mission Ridge.

ROBERT LEWIS KIMBERLY.

NOTE.—­The writer is aware that this narrative of the battle of Chickamauga differs so materially from the commonly-received impressions of that event that it ought to be supported by more than his own authority.  The reader will observe that the main narrative is made up of the experiences of one command, that to which the writer belonged, and of which he can therefore speak as of things