ed by the Confederate commander, and it was clear
to him that his policy was to husband his resources and
preserve them as best he could for the assault, which it was
reasonable to expect would occur during the day. He
recognized the fact that his guns were only defensive and
he had little or no offensive power with which to contend
with his adversaries. Acting on this conviction he had the
light guns dismounted and covered with sand bags, and the
same precaution was adopted to preserve some of the shell
guns or fixed carriages. The propriety of this determination
was abundantly demonstrated in the end.

"About a quarter past 8 o'clock the storm broke, ship after
ship and battery after battery, and then apparently all
together, vomited forth their horrid flames and the
atmosphere was filled with deadly missiles. It is impossible
for any pen to describe or for anyone who was not an
eye-witness to conceive the frightful grandeur of the
spectacle. The writer has never had the fortune to read any
official Federal report or any other account of the
operations of this day except an extract from the graphic
and eloquent address of the Rev. Mr. Dennison, a chaplain of
one of the Northern regiments, delivered on its nineteenth
anniversary at Providence, R. I. He says: 'Words cannot
depict the thunder, the smoke, the lifted sand and the
general havoc which characterized that hot summer day. What
a storm of iron fell on that island; the roar of the guns
was incessant; how the shots ploughed the sand banks and the
marshes; how the splinters flew from the Beacon House; how
the whole island smoked like a furnace and trembled as from
an earthquake.'

"If that was true outside of Wagner it is easy to conceive
how intensified the situation was within its narrow limits
towards which every hostile gun was pointed. The sand came
down in avalanches; huge vertical shells and those rolled
over by the ricochet shots from the ships, buried themselves
and then exploded, rending the earth and forming great
craters, out of which the sand and iron fragments flew high
in the air. It was a fierce sirocco freighted with iron as
well as sand. The sand flew over from the seashore, from the
glacis, from the exterior slope, from the parapet, as it was
pl