“Take it up to ‘Illinoy,’” and then hundreds would mass around my quarters to bear the news read.

The Rebel papers usually had very meager reports of the operations of the armies, and these were greatly distorted, but they were still very interesting, and as we always started in to read with the expectation that the whole statement was a mass of perversions and lies, where truth was an infrequent accident, we were not likely to be much impressed with it.

There was a marled difference in the tone of the reports brought in from the different armies.  Sherman’s men were always sanguine.  They had no doubt that they were pushing the enemy straight to the wall, and that every day brought the Southern Confederacy much nearer its downfall.  Those from the Army of the Potomac were never so hopeful.  They would admit that Grant was pounding Lee terribly, but the shadow of the frequent defeats of the Army of the Potomac seemed to hang depressingly over them.

There came a day, however, when our sanguine hopes as to Sherman were checked by a possibility that he had failed; that his long campaign towards Atlanta had culminated in such a reverse under the very walls of the City as would compel an abandonment of the enterprise, and possibly a humiliating retreat.  We knew that Jeff.  Davis and his Government were strongly dissatisfied with the Fabian policy of Joe Johnston.  The papers had told us of the Rebel President’s visit to Atlanta, of his bitter comments on Johnston’s tactics; of his going so far as to sneer about the necessity of providing pontoons at Key West, so that Johnston might continue his retreat even to Cuba.  Then came the news of Johnston’s Supersession by Hood, and the papers were full of the exulting predictions of what would now be accomplished “when that gallant young soldier is once fairly in the saddle.”

All this meant one supreme effort to arrest the onward course of Sherman.  It indicated a resolve to stake the fate of Atlanta, and the fortunes of the Confederacy in the West, upon the hazard of one desperate fight.  We watched the summoning up of every Rebel energy for the blow with apprehension.  We dreaded another Chickamauga.

The blow fell on the 22d of July.  It was well planned.  The Army of the Tennessee, the left of Sherman’s forces, was the part struck.  On the night of the 21st Hood marched a heavy force around its left flank and gained its rear.  On the 22d this force fell on the rear with the impetuous violence of a cyclone, while the Rebels in the works immediately around Atlanta attacked furiously in front.