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maintain against each other almost without intermission.
There is little pause in the exchange of shells and round shot.
The careful chiefs have required their men to lie down.
In brief, it looks as if each party were inviting the other to begin.
these circumstances, the sharp-shooting and cannonading, ugly as they may seem to one who thinks of them under comfortable surroundings, did in fact serve a good purpose the day in question in helping the men to forget their sufferings of the night before.
It must be remembered that the weather had changed during the preceding afternoon: from suggestions of spring it turned to intensified
winter.
From lending a gentle hand in bringing
Foote and his iron-clads up the river, the wind whisked suddenly around to the north and struck both armies with a storm of mixed rain, snow, and sleet.
All night the tempest blew mercilessly upon the unsheltered, fireless soldier, making sleep impossible.
Inside the works, nobody had overcoats; while thousands of those outside had marched from
Fort Henry as to a summer fete, leaving coats, blankets, and knapsacks behind them in the camp.
More than one stout fellow has since admitted, with a laugh, that nothing was so helpful to him that horrible night as the thought that the wind, which seemed about to turn his blood into icicles, was serving the enemy the same way; they, too, had to stand out and take the blast.
Let us now go back to the preceding day, and bring up an incident of
McClernand's swing into position.
about the center of the
Confederate outworks there was a V-shaped hill, marked sharply by a ravine on its right and another on its left.
This
Colonel Heiman occupied with his Brigade of five regiments — all of
Tennessee but one.
The front presented was about 2500 feet. In the angle of the V, on the summit of the hill,
Captain Maney's battery, also of
Tennessee, had been planted.
Without protection of any kind, it nevertheless completely swept a large field to the left, across which an assaulting force would have to come in order to get at
Heiman or at
Drake, next on the south.
Maney, on the point of the hill, had been active throughout the preceding afternoon, and had succeeded in drawing the fire of some of
McClernand's guns.
The duel lasted until night.
Next morning it was renewed with increased sharpness,
Maney being assisted on his right by
Graves's battery of
Buckner's division, and by some pieces of
Drake's on his left.
