L. P. Brockett, The camp, the battlefield, and the hospital: or, lights and shadows of the great rebellion

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[258] battery that frowns above him, by Bragg's headquarters, shakes his cap amid that storm of every thing that kills, when you could hardly hold out your hand without catching a bullet in it, and with a “how are you?” tosses off the cup. The blue battle flag of the rebels fluttered a response to the cool salute, and the next instant the battery let fly its six guns, showering Sheridan with earth. Alluding to that compliment with any thing but a blank cartridge, the general said to me in his quiet way, “I thought it ungenerous!” The recording angel will drop a tear upon the word for the part he played that day. Wheeling toward the men, he cheered them to the charge, and made at the hill like a bold riding hunter; they were out of the rifle-pits, and into the tempest, and struggling up the steep, before you could get breath to tell it, and so they were throughout the inspired line.

And now you have before you one of the most startling episodes of the war; I cannot remember it in words; dictionaries are beggarly things. But I may tell you they did not storm that mountain as you would think. They dash out a little way, and then slacken; they creep up, hand over hand, loading and firing, and wavering and halting, from the first line of works to the second; they burst into a charge with a cheer, and go over it. Sheets of flame baptize them; plunging shot tear away comrades on left and right; it is no longer shoulder to shoulder; it is God for us all! Under tree trunks, among rocks, stumbling over the dead, struggling with the living, facing the steady fire of eight thousand infantry poured down upon their heads as if it were the old historic curse from heaven, they wrestle with the