At dawn two brigades had charged and captured the place.  The enemy returned to the attack, and for twenty hours thereafter the two armies fought, hurling regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade into the trenches.  There was a pouring rain, and the smoke hung black about them; they could only see the flashes of the guns, and the faces of the enemy, here and there.

The Colonel described the approach of his regiment.  They lay down for a moment in a swamp, and the minie-balls sang like swarming bees, and split the blades of the grass above them.  Then they charged, over ground that ran with human blood.  In the trenches the bodies of dead and dying men lay three deep, and were trampled out of sight in the mud by the feet of those who fought.  They would crouch behind the works, lifting their guns high over their heads, and firing into the throngs on the other side; again and again men sprang upon the breastworks and fired their muskets, and then fell dead.  They dragged up cannon, one after another, and blew holes through the logs, and raked the’ ground with charges of canister.

While the Colonel read, still in his calm, matter-of-fact voice, you might see men leaning forward in their chairs, hands clenched, teeth set.  They knew!  They knew!  Had there ever before been a time in history when breastworks had been charged by artillery?  Twenty-four men in the crew of one gun, and only two unhurt!  One iron sponge-bucket with thirty-nine bullet holes shot through it!  And then blasts of canister sweeping the trenches, and blowing scores of living and dead men to fragments!  And into this hell of slaughter new regiments charging, in lines four deep!  And squad after squad of the enemy striving to surrender, and shot to pieces by their own comrades as they clambered over the blood-soaked walls!  And heavy timbers in the defences shot to splinters!  Huge oak trees—­one of them twenty-four inches in diameter—­crashing down upon the combatants, gnawed through by rifle-bullets!  Since the world began had men ever fought like that?

Then the Colonel told of his own wound in the shoulder, and how, toward dusk, he had crawled away; and how he became lost, and strayed into the enemy’s line, and was thrust into a batch of prisoners and marched to the rear.  And then of the night that he spent beside a hospital camp in the Wilderness, where hundreds of wounded and dying men lay about on the rain-soaked ground, moaning, screaming, praying to be killed.  Again the prisoners were moved, having been ordered to march to the railroad; and on the way the Colonel went blind from suffering and exhaustion, and staggered and fell in the road.  You could have heard a pin drop in the room, in the pause between sentences in his story, as he told how the guard argued with him to persuade him to go on.  It was their duty to kill him if he refused, but they could not bring themselves to do it.  In the end they left the job to one, and he stood and cursed the officer, trying to get up his courage; and finally fired his gun into the air, and went off and left him.