ere we to oppose our paltry five
thousand breasts to an army flushed with victory? What protected our
right? Who lay upon our left? Was there really anything in our front?

There came, borne to us on the raw morning air, the long, weird note of a
bugle. It was directly before us. It rose with a low, clear, deliberate
warble, and seemed to float in the gray sky like the note of a lark. The
bugle calls of the Federal and the Confederate armies were the same: it
was the "assembly"! As it died away I observed that the atmosphere had
suffered a change; despite the equilibrium established by the storm, it
was electric. Wings were growing on blistered feet. Bruised muscles and
jolted bones, shoulders pounded by the cruel knapsack, eyelids leaden from
lack of sleep--all were pervaded by the subtle fluid, all were unconscious
of their clay. The men thrust forward their heads, expanded their eyes and
clenched their teeth. They breathed hard, as if throttled by tugging at
the leash. If you had laid your hand in the beard or hair of one of these
men it would have crackled and shot sparks.

VI

I suppose the country lying between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing could
boast a few inhabitants other than alligators. What manner of people they
were it is impossible to say, inasmuch as the fighting dispersed, or
possibly exterminated them; perhaps in merely classing them as non-saurian
I shall describe them with sufficient particularity and at the same time
avert from myself the natural suspicion attaching to a writer who points
out to persons who do not know him the peculiarities of persons whom he
does not know. One thing, however, I hope I may without offense affirm of
these swamp-dwellers--they were pious. To what deity their veneration was
given--whether, like the Egyptians, they worshiped the crocodile, or, like
other Americans, adored themselves, I do not presume to guess. But
whoever, or whatever, may have been the divinity whose ends they shaped,
unto Him, or It, they had builded a temple. This humble edifice, centrally
situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the
supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of
the battle. The fact of a Christian church--assuming it to have been a
Christian church--giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats
by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its
recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated