if it could be done.
Thomas was the proper commander, and he was needed. It was agreed that
Hazen should make the attempt.

The brigade was withdrawn from the line which it had faithfully held all
day, and some disposition made to fill the gap. Hazen formed his
regiments in close masses, faced them to the right and rear, covered his
front with a trusty battalion as skirmishers, waved an adieu to the
comrades left behind, and plunged into the unknown forest in the
direction of Thomas's firing. On and on went the brigade and came nearer
and nearer to the ridge which Thomas held. Suddenly, the skirmishers
strike obliquely an opposing line. They brush it away in an instant, but
the warning is not lost. Keep more to the rear: no fighting now, though
you should whip three to one. The fate of the four divisions rests upon
that. With quick and steady tread the regiments move on. They clear the
wood at last, climb the end of a ridge through a field of standing
corn, and burst into an open field at the summit amid the wild cheers of
Thomas's exhausted men, while Thomas himself, beloved of all the army,
rides down to take Hazen by the hand. And not a moment too soon.

Almost at the very instant Thomas's skirmishers along the front of the
ridge broke out into a rattling fire, and were seen falling back. The
enemy was about to make his final effort, and it was to be against the
flank where now lay Hazen's brigade. Quickly deploying his regiments,
Hazen placed them in four lines, closed one upon another, and the men
lay flat upon their faces. The yell of the enemy was heard in the wood
below, and in a moment the declivity in front was covered with the heavy
lines of the assailants. Then the first of Hazen's regiments was brought
to its feet and poured its volley straight into the faces of the
oncoming foe. The next regiment, and the next, and then the last,
followed in quick succession. The echoes of the last volley had hardly
died away before the enemy, who came on so confident and so strong, had
disappeared, crushed and broken, into the forest, leaving the hillside
strewn with his dead and wounded.

So ended the fighting. Night came down and shrouded the fierce
combatants from each other's sight.

The dusky ranks take up the unfamiliar march with faces from the foe.
Their drums are silent, and their bugles voice-less as the spirit-horns
which marshal their heroic dead upon the farther shore. The shadowy
ranks pass on into the