ells into this
pit of the damned.

The charging gray lines rolled over the captured trenches. They ringed
the edge of the crater with a circle of flaming muskets. The writhing
mass of dead, dying, wounded and living, scrambling blacks and whites,
was a thing for devil's joy. At the bottom of the pit the heap was ten
feet deep in moving flesh. In vain the terror-stricken blacks scrambled
up the slippery sides through clouds of smoke. They fell backward and
rolled down the crumbling walls.

Young John Doyle stood on the brink of this crater, his eyes aflame
with revenge. His musket was so hot at last he threw it down, tore a
cartridge belt from the body of a dead negro trooper, seized his rifle
and went back to his task.

Sickened at last by the holocaust, the officers of the South ordered
their men to cease firing. They had charged without orders. They refused
to take orders. The officers began to strike them with their swords!

"Cease firing!"

"Damn you, stop it!"

Their orders rang around the flaming curve in vain. They seized the men
by their collars and dragged them back. The gray soldiers tore away,
rushed to the smoking rim and fired as long as they had a cartridge in
their belts.

It was the poor white man who got beyond control at the sight of these
yelling black troops wearing the uniform of the Republic. Had their
souls leaped the years and seen in a vision dark-skinned hosts charging
the ranks of white civilization in a battle for supremacy of the world?

CHAPTER XLV

When the smoke had lifted from the field of the Black Battalions,
Lee stood in Richmond before a secret meeting of the leaders of the
Confederacy. Jefferson Davis presided. The meeting was called by request
of the Commander. He had an important announcement to make.

Facing the anxious group gathered around the Cabinet table he spoke with
unusual emphasis:

"Gentlemen, the end is in sight unless I can have more men. So long as
I can burrow underground my half-clothed and half-starved soldiers will
hold Grant at bay. I may hold him until next spring. Not longer. The
North is using negro troops. They have enrolled nearly two hundred
thousand. Their man power counts. We can arm our negroes to meet them.
They will fight under the leadership of their masters. I speak as a
mathematician and a soldier. I do not discuss the sentimental side. I
must have men and I must have them before spring or your cause is lost."

Robert Toombs o