le quick! march!" shouted Capt. O'Neil, the
senior line officer, who was now in command.

"Forward! Double quick!" was repeated by each company commander, and the
Sixty-Third followed the lead of the battery into the very jaws of
death, many of them to meet their brothers of the Ninth, who just passed
over the silent river, on the crimson tide of war![10]

Had the repeated and desperate efforts of the enemy succeeded in turning
the Union left, as was feared towards nightfall, a dire disaster awaited
the splendid army of McClellan. How near we came to it may be judged
from the fact that all the reserves were brought into action, including
the artillery under Gen. Henry J. Hunt. The instructions to Smead,
Carlisle and Mead, when hurried up to defend the narrow gorge, with
their artillery, through which the Confederates must force their way on
to the plateau, were to fire on friend and foe, if the emergency
demanded it. This is confirmed by a letter to the writer from Fitz John
Porter. "These batteries were ordered up," he says, "to the narrow part
of the hill, to be used in saving the rest of the army, if those in
front were broken, driven in and pursued, by firing, if necessary, on
friend as well as foe, so that the latter should not pass them. I went
forward with you to share your fate if fortune deserted us, but I did
not expect disaster, and, thank God, it did not come!"

These are the words of as brave and loyal an American as ever drew his
sword for the Republic. Few men, perhaps none, in the army at that time,
with our limited experience in war, could have handled his troops as
Gen. Porter did at Gaine's Mill and Malvern. He desperately contested
every inch of ground on the north bank of the Chickahominy, although
his force was only twenty-seven thousand against sixty-five thousand of
the enemy. Again at Malvern, the Rebels, maddened with successive
defeats, were determined to annihilate the grand army of the Potomac
with a last superhuman effort. They probably would have succeeded had a
less able soldier been placed in command at that critical point. But, as
will be seen from the above extract, the General never for a moment lost
hope of being able to successfully repulse the enemy, for no man knew
the material he had to do it with better than he.

What a pity that the services of such an able soldier should have been
lost to the army and the country, a few weeks later, through the petty
jealousies of small men