Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[538] which, with the aid of cavalry, should occupy all the space comprised between the two streams. An interval of a thousand metres was to be preserved between the lines; and in order that they might present a front nearly equal, the second corps supplied the third with a few brigades.

Johnston was in hopes of making his army perform the greatest part of the distance of from twenty-six to twenty-eight kilometres, which separated him from the Federal outposts, during the 4th, so as to be thus able to fight the battle on Saturday, the 5th. But night overtook the soldiers, little accustomed to marching, before they had reached the points determined upon. The next morning the roads were soon crowded; some corps remained eight hours under arms before they could be started, and all that could be done was to go into bivouac almost in sight of the enemy's outposts on the evening of the 5th.

A cavalry reconnaissance had been made the day before along the whole Federal line, and towards the close of that very day some patrols of Hardee's corps exchanged shots with Sherman's outposts; but they had immediately fallen back, and the Federal generals attached no importance to such trifling skirmishes. In the mean time, an army of forty thousand men, lying in ambush within reach of the guns of its camps, was waiting, under the cover of darkness and the thick foliage of the virgin forest, for the break of day, which was to be the signal for the attack. A warm spring night gave assurance that a burning sun would shine over the bloody morrow; but there were no camp-fires to enliven the long hours of that night for the soldiers of the army of the Mississippi. They were surrounded by a line of outposts carefully stationed; the sentinels had been doubled, and they were instructed to allow no one to cross their line—an indispensable precaution, in view of the fact that a single deserter might put the enemy on his guard, especially in an army which, having been levied for a civil war, counted more than one resident of the North in its ranks who had been enlisted by compulsion. It would have required a keen eye to discover at the bottom of a ravine the only fire which had been kindled in that camp, where every one was preparing in silence, and without light, for the conflict of the next day. Its flickering flame projected on the surrounding trees