ges on fire. The forests, which had been felled
from the Golden Farm to Fair Oaks to form an army's vast abattis,
were burning in sections, sending roaring tornadoes of flame into
rifle pits, redoubts, and abandoned fortifications. Cannon
thundered at Ellison's Mills; shells rained hard on Gaines's Farm;
a thousand simultaneous volleys of musketry mingled with the awful
uproar of the cannon; uninterrupted sheets of light from the shells
brightened the smoke pall like the continuous flare of electricity
against a thundercloud. The Confederacy, victorious, was advancing
wrapped in flame and smoke.

At Savage's Station the long railroad bridge was now on fire;
trains and locomotives burned fiercely; millions of boxes of hard
bread, barrels of flour, rice, sugar, coffee, salt pork, cases of
shoes, underclothing, shirts, uniforms, tin-ware, blankets,
ponchos, harness, medical stores, were in flames; magazines of
ammunition, flat cars and box cars loaded with powder, shells, and
cartridges blazed and exploded, hurling jets and spouting fountains
of fire to the very zenith.

And through the White Oak Swamp rode the Commander-in-chief of an
army in full retreat, followed by his enormous staff and escort,
abandoning the siege of Richmond, and leaving to their fate the
wretched mass of sick and wounded in the dreadful hospitals at
Liberty Hall. And the red battle flags of the Southland fluttered
on every hill.

Claymore's mixed brigade, still holding together, closed the rear
of Porter's powder-scorched _corps d'armee_.

The Zouaves of the 3rd Regiment--what was left of them--marched as
flankers; McDunn's battery, still intact, was forced to unlimber
every few rods; and the pouring rain turned to a driving golden
fire in the red glare of the guns, which lighted up the halted
squadrons of the Lancers ranged always in support.

Every rod in retreat was a running combat. In the darkness the
discharge of the Zouaves' rifles ran from the guns' muzzles like
streams of molten metal spilling out on the grass. McDunn's guns
spirted great lumps of incandescence; the fuses of the shells in
the sky showered the darkness with swarming sparks.

Toward ten o'clock the harried column halted on a hill and
bivouacked without fires, food, or shelter. The Zouaves slept on
their arms in the drenched herbage; the Lancers, not daring to
unsaddle, lay down on the grass under their patient horses, bridle
tied to wrist. An awful anxiety c