The stream of fugitives increased, and now they saw swarms of men who stood here and there, not running, but huddled and irresolute.  Never did Fortune, who brought this, her favorite, from the depths, bring him again in her play so near to the verge of destruction.  When he came upon the field, the battle seemed wholly lost, and the whole world would have cried that he was to blame.

But the bulldog in Grant was never of stauncher breed than on that day.  His face turned white, and he grew sick at the sight of the awful slaughter.  A bullet broke the small sword at his side, but he did not flinch.  Preserving the stern calm that always marked him on the field he began to form his lines anew and strengthen the weaker points.

Yet the condition of his army would have appalled a weaker will.  It had been driven back three miles.  His whole camp had been taken.  His second line also had been driven in.  Many thousands of men had fallen and other thousands had been taken.  Thirty of his cannon were in the hands of the enemy, and although noon had now come and gone there was no sound to betoken the coming of the troops led by Wallace or Nelson.  Well might Grant’s own stout heart have shrunk appalled from the task before him.

Wallace was held back by confused orders, pardonable at such a time.  The eager Nelson was detained at Savannah by Buell, who thought that the sounds of the engagement they heard in the Shiloh woods was a minor affair, and who wanted Nelson to wait for boats to take him there.

It seemed sometimes to Dick long afterward, when the whole of the great Shiloh battle became clear, that Fortune was merely playing a game of chess, with the earth as a board, and the armies as pawns.  Grant’s army was ambushed with its general absent.  The other armies which were almost at hand were delayed for one reason or another.  While as for the South, the genius that had planned the attack and that had carried it forward was quenched in death, when victory was at its height.

But for the present the lad had little time for such thoughts as these.  The success of Sherman in holding the new position infused new courage into him and those around him.  The men in gray, wearied with their immense exertions, and having suffered frightful losses themselves, abated somewhat the energy and fierceness of their attack.

The dissolved Northern regiments had time to reform.  Grant seized a new position along a line of hills, in front of which ran a deep ravine filled with brushwood.  He and his officers appreciated the advantage and they massed the troops there as fast as they could.

Now Fortune, after having brought Grant to the verge of the pit, was disposed to throw chances in his way.  The hills and the ravine were one.  Another, and most important it was, was the presence of guns of the heaviest calibre landed some days ago from the fleet, and left there until their disposition could be determined.  A quick-witted colonel, Webster by name, gathered up all the gunners who had lost their own guns and who had been driven back in the retreat, and manned this great battery of siege guns, just as the Southern generals were preparing to break down the last stand of the North.