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[70]
In the course of the forenoon, the corps moves along the Fairfax, C. H., road, but it seems to us very leisurely.
After a long halt at Annandale, our ears betimes greeted with the sound of cannonading beyond Centreville, it was near sunset when we marched over the heights at that place, and pushed on toward Bull Run.
In the wooded plain beyond Cub Run, we met a most singularly mixed crowd of infantry, wagoners, ambulances and cavalry, moving helter skelter toward Centreville.
‘What's this?’
asked some one of us of a man in the throng.
‘Another Bull Run!’
he said.
It was growing dark as we pushed through this surging mass, and we now saw some cavalry forming in line across the plain, evidently endeavoring to stem and turn the disorderly tide setting northward.
Now we heard a drummer say to a fifer, ‘Come, strike up, I'm going to sound a rally!’
and suiting his action to his words, he beat a lively call.
It might have been twenty minutes later, during which time we had been steadily moving forward through an incongruous mass of humanity, when our column, probably in pursuance of orders, countermarched and moved back toward Cub Run.
It was ludicrous, that crossing of the run. There was a bridge we had passed over, but on the return, some crowded upon it, some passed below, others above it; some struck the path, some insensibly deployed to the left, others strung along to the right of the road.
Sometime in the night, we halted at the base of Centreville Heights, on the north side.
The 31st of August was a quiet day at Centreville.
Our battery occupied one of the round forts on the heights, our guns being in position to sweep the road at the base, but the Confederates made no demonstration against this place.
Their next movement would be an attempt to pass around our right.
The result of this was the engagement at Chantilly on the morrow.
...
During the morning, men of the Fifteenth Massachusetts, and of other commands not belonging to the Sixth Corps, came in, who related that Heintzelman's corps had, on the morning of the 28th, forced Jackson to retreat across Bull Run, by the Centreville pike; that McDowell had succeeded in checking Lee at Thoroughfare Gap in the Bull Run mountains; but that Jackson, having
Boston. Press of Deland and Barta, 1886.
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