One instance was particularly horrible. After some hours of
close engagement my brigade, with foul pieces and exhausted cartridge
boxes, was relieved and withdrawn to the road to protect several batteries
of artillery--probably two dozen pieces--which commanded an open field in
the rear of our line. Before our weary and virtually disarmed men had
actually reached the guns the line in front gave way, fell back behind the
guns and went on, the Lord knows whither. A moment later the field was
gray with Confederates in pursuit. Then the guns opened fire with grape
and canister and for perhaps five minutes--it seemed an hour--nothing
could be heard but the infernal din of their discharge and nothing seen
through the smoke but a great ascension of dust from the smitten soil.
When all was over, and the dust cloud had lifted, the spectacle was too
dreadful to describe. The Confederates were still there--all of them, it
seemed--some almost under the muzzles of the guns. But not a man of all
these brave fellows was on his feet, and so thickly were all covered with
dust that they looked as if they had been reclothed in yellow.
"We bury our dead," said a gunner, grimly, though doubtless all were
afterward dug out, for some were partly alive.
To a "day of danger" succeeded a "night of waking." The enemy, everywhere
held back from the road, continued to stretch his line northward in the
hope to overlap us and put himself between us and Chattanooga. We neither
saw nor heard his movement, but any man with half a head would have known
that he was making it, and we met it by a parallel movement to our left.
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