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and when, at dusk, these encountered some of
Blenker's pickets in the gloom, they wheeled and hastened back to the
Stone Bridge, when some of his brigade went boldly forward, and brought away two of the cannon abandoned near
Cub Run.
1 In the mean time a part of
Beauregard's reserves, which had been ordered up, had arrived.
At
Centreville,
McDowell held a brief and informal council with his officers, when it was determined to continue the retreat to the defenses of Washington, for the shattered and
demoralized army was in no condition to resist even one-half of the
Confederates known to be at
Manassas.
They had been on duty almost twenty-four hours, without sleep, without much rest, and many of them without food; and during seven or eight hours of the time, a greater portion of those who came over
Bull's Run had been fighting under a blazing sun. They needed rest; but so, dangerous did it seem to remain, that the soldiers cheerfully obeyed the order to move forward.
Indeed, large numbers of them had already done so. Leaving the sick, and wounded, and dying, who could not be removed, under proper caretakers in a stone church at
Centreville (which was used a long time as a hospital), the army moved forward at a little past ten o'clock, with
Colonel Richardson's brigade as a rear-guard.
Most of them reached the camps near
Washington, which they had left
in high spirits on the 16th,
before daylight.
Richardson left
Centreville at two o'clock in the morning, when all the other troops and batteries had retired, and twelve hours afterward he was with his brigade on Arlington Hights.
The survivors of the conflict had left behind them not less, probably, in killed, wounded, and prisoners, than three thousand five hundred of their comrades,
