away with the
cavalry, mounted and dismounted, and deluding the Rebels with the idea
that he was the sole attacking party; they lay concealed in the woods
behind the Gravelly Run meeting-house, but their left was not a
half-mile distant from the Rebel works, though their right reached so
far off that a novice would have criticized the position sharply. Little
by little, Sheridan, extending his lines, drove the whole Rebel force
into their breastworks; then he dismounted the mass of his cavalry and
charged the works straight in the front, still thundering on their
flank. At last, every Rebel was safe behind his intrenchments. Then the
signal was given, and the concealed infantry, many thousand strong,
sprang up and advanced by echelon to the right. Imagine a great barndoor
shutting to, and you have the movement, if you can also imagine the door
itself, hinge and all, moving forward also. This was the door:--

AYRES--CRAWFORD--GRIFFIN.

Stick a pin through Ayres and turn Griffin and Crawford forward as you
would a spoke in a wheel, but move your pin up also a very little. In
this way Ayres will advance, say half a mile, and Griffin, to describe a
quarter revolution, will move through a radius of four miles. But to
complicate this movement by echelon, we must imagine the right when half
way advanced cutting across the centre and reforming, while Crawford
became the right and Griffin the middle of the line of battle. Warren
was with Crawford on this march. Gregory commanded the skirmishers.
Ayres was so close to the Rebel left that he might be said to hinge upon
it; and at 6 o'clock the whole corps column came crash upon the full
flank of the astonished Rebels. Now came the pitch of the battle.

We were already on the Rebel right in force, and thinly in their rear.
Our carbineers were making feint to charge in direct front, and our
infantry, four deep, hemmed in their entire left. All this they did not
for an instant note, so thorough was their confusion; but seeing it
directly, they, so far from giving up, concentrated all their energy and
fought like fiends. They had a battery in position, which belched
incessantly, and over the breastworks their musketry made one unbroken
roll, while against Sheridan's prowlers on their left, by skirmish and
sortie, they stuck to their sinking fortunes, so as to win unwilling
applause from mouths of wisest censure.

It was just at the coming up of the infantry that Sheridan's li