deadly weakness and horror came
over him. "O God!--Let us die--"

From the rear, to A. P. Hill's right, where was Longstreet, broke a faint
yelling. It grew clearer, came nearer. From another direction--from the
left--burst a like sound, increasing likewise, high, wild, and clear. Like
a breath over the field went the conviction--_Jackson--Jackson at last!_
Allan dropped in the broom sedge, his arm beneath his head. The grey sleeve
was wet with tears. The pendulum was swinging; he was home in the dear and
dread world.

The sound increased; the earth began to shake with the tread of men; the
tremendous guns began again their bellowing. Longstreet swung into
action, with the brigades of Kemper, Anderson, Pickett, Willcox, Pryor,
and Featherstone. On the left, with his own division, with Ewell's, with
D. H. Hill's, Jackson struck at last like Jackson. Whiting, with two
brigades, should have been with Jackson, but, missing his way in the
wood, came instead to Longstreet, and with him entered the battle. The
day was descending. All the plain was smoky or luridly lit; a vast
Shield of Mars, with War in action. With Longstreet and with Jackson up
at last, Lee put forth his full strength. Fifty thousand men in grey,
thirty-five thousand men in blue, were at once engaged--in three hundred
years there had been in the Western Hemisphere no battle so heavy as
this one. The artillery jarred even the distant atmosphere, and the high
mounting clouds were tinged with red. Six miles away, Richmond listened
aghast.

Allan forgot his wounds, forgot his thirst, forgot the terror, sick and
cold, of the minute past. He no longer heard the groaning. The storm of
sound swept it away. He was a fighter with the grey; all his soul was in
the prayer. "Let them come! Let them conquer!" He thought, _Let the war
bleed and the mighty die_. He saw a charge approaching. Willingly would
he have been stamped into the earth would it further the feet on their
way. The grey line hung an instant, poised on the further rim of the
gully, then swept across and onward. Until the men were by him, it was
thick night, thick and stifling. They passed. He heard the yelling as
they charged the slope, the prolonged tremendous rattle of musketry, the
shouts, the foiled assault, and the breaking of the wave. Another came,
a wall of darkness in the closing day. Over it hung a long cloud,
red-stained. Allan prayed aloud. "O God of Battles--O God of Battles--"

The wave