moving
creek. A. P. Hill was a superb fighter. He sent in his brigades. They
returned, broken; he sent them in again. They went. The 16th and 22d
North Carolina passed the three lines of blazing rifles, got to the head
of the cliff, found themselves among the guns. In vain. Morrell's
artillerymen, Morrell's infantry, pushed them back and down, down the
hillside, back into the slashing. The 35th Georgia launched itself like
a thunderbolt and pierced the lines, but it, too, was hurled down.
Gregg's South Carolinians and Sykes Regulars locked and swayed. Archer
and Pender, Field and Branch, charged and were repelled, to charge
again. Save in marksmanship, the Confederate batteries could not match
the Federal; strength was with the great, blue rifled guns, and yet the
grey cannoneers wrought havoc on the plateau and amid the breastworks.
The sound was enormous, a complex tumult that crashed and echoed in the
head. The whole of the field existed in the throbbing, expanded
brain--all battlefields, all life, all the world and other worlds, all
problems solved and insoluble. The wide-flung grey battlefront was now
sickle-shaped, convex to the foe. The rolling dense smoke flushed
momently with a lurid glare. In places the forest was afire, in others
the stubble of the field. From horn to horn of the sickle galloped the
riderless horses. Now and again a wounded one among them screamed
fearfully.

Allan dragged himself back to the gully. It was safer there, because the
charging lines must lessen speed, break ranks a little; they would not
be so resistlessly borne on and over him. He was not light-headed, or he
thought he was not. He lay on the rim of the gully that was now trampled
into a mere trough of dust, and he looked at the red light on the
rolling vapour. Where it lifted he saw, as in a pageant, war in
mid-career. Sound, too, had organized. He could have beaten time to the
gigantic rhythm. It rose and sank; it was made up of groaning, shouting,
breathing of men, gasping, and the sounds that horses make, with louder
and louder the thunder of the inanimate, the congregated sound of the
allies man had devised,--the saltpetre he had digged, the powder he had
made, the rifles he had manufactured, the cannon he had moulded, the
solid shot, grape, canister, shrapnel, minie balls. The shells were
fearful, Allan was fain to acknowledge. They passed like whistling
winds. They filled the air like great rocks from a blasting. The
stau