st effort to recapture the
batteries has failed. The Union line of advance has been seriously
checked. Some of our own guns in those batteries are turned on us. The
Enemy's Infantry make a rush over the blood-soaked brow of the fatal
plateau, pouring into our men a deadly fire, as they advance,--while
over to our right and rear, at the same moment, are seen the fresh
regiments of Early's Brigade coming out of the woods--deploying rapidly
in several lines--with Stuart's handful of Rebel Cavalry, while
Beckham's guns, in the same quarter, open an oblique enfilading reverse
fire upon us, in a lively manner.

At once the minds of the fagged-out Union troops become filled with the
dispiriting idea that the exhausting fight which they have made all day
long, has been simply with Beauregard's Army of the Potomac, and that
these fresh Rebel troops, on the Union right and rear, are the vanguard
of Johnston's Army of the Shenandoah! After all the hard marching and
fighting they have done during the last thirteen hours,--with empty
stomachs, and parched lips, under a scorching sun that still, as it
descends in the West, glowers down upon them, through the murky air,
like a great, red, glaring eye,--the very thought is terrible!

Without fear, yet equally without hope, the Union troops crumble to
groups, and then to individuals. The attempt of McDowell to turn the
left of the Enemy's Bull Run line, has failed.

McDowell and his officers heroically but vainly strive, at great
personal risk to themselves, to stem the tide of confusion, and
disorder. Sykes's battalion of regulars, which has been at our left,
now steadily moves obliquely across the field of battle toward our
right, to a hill in the midground, which it occupies, and, with the aid
of Arnold's Battery and Palmer's Cavalry, holds, while the exhausted and
disorganized troops of the Union Army doggedly and slowly retire toward
Sudley Ford, their rear covered by an irregular square of Infantry,
which, mainly by the exertions of Colonel Corcoran, has been formed to
resist a threatened charge of Stuart's Cavalry.

[At the rate of "not more than two, or two and a half, miles an
hour," and not "helter-skelter," as some narrators state.]

It is not fear, that has got the better of our Union troops. It is
physical exhaustion for one thing; it is thirst for another. Men must
drink,--even if they have foolishly thrown away their canteens,--and
many have retired