Brigade, of four
regiments and a light artillery battery, being engaged with the heavy
masked battery (Imboden's and two other pieces), and nearly seven full
regiments of the Enemy.

The regiments of Burnside's Brigade are getting considerably cut up.
Colonels Slocum and Marston, and Major Balch, are wounded. There is
some confusion in the ranks, and the Rhode Island Battery is in danger
of capture, when General Andrew Porter--whose own brigade has just
reached the field and is deploying to the right of Burnside's--succeeds
Hunter in command of the division, and rides over to his left. Burnside
asks him for Sykes's battalion of regulars, which is accordingly
detached from the extreme right of Andrew Porter's Division, rapidly
forms on the left, in support of the Rhode Island Battery, and opens a
hot and effective fire which, in connection with the renewed fire of
Burnside's rallied regiments, and the opening artillery practice of
Griffin's Battery--that has just come up at a gallop and gone into a
good position upon an eminence to the right of Porter's Division, and to
the right of the Sudley road looking South--fairly staggers the Enemy.

And now the brigades of Sherman and Keyes, having been ordered across
Bull Run by General Tyler, are seen advancing from Poplar Ford, at the
rear of our left,--Sherman's Brigade, headed by Corcoran's 69th New York
Regiment, coming up on Burnside's left, while Keves's Brigade is
following, to the left again of, Sherman.

[Sherman, in his Official Report, after mentioning the receipt by
him of Tyler's order to "cross over with the whole brigade to the
assistance of Colonel Hunter"--which he did, so far as the Infantry
was concerned, but left his battery under Ayres behind, on account
of the impassability of the bluff on the Western bank of Bull Run
--says: "Early in the day, when reconnoitering the ground, I had seen
a horseman descend from a bluff in our front, cross the stream, and
show himself in the open field, and, inferring we could cross over
at the same point, I sent forward a company as skirmishers, and
followed with the whole brigade, the New York Sixty-ninth leading."

This is evidently the ford at the elbow of Bull Run, to the right
of Sherman's front, which is laid down on the Army-maps as "Poplar
Ford," and which McDowell's engineers had previously discovered and
mapped; and to which Major Barnard