cursed guns!--not the enemy's, but our own. Had it not been for
them, we might have died like men. They must be supported, forsooth, the
feeble, boasting bullies! It was impossible to conceive that these pieces
were doing the enemy as excellent a mischief as his were doing us; they
seemed to raise their "cloud by day" solely to direct aright the streaming
procession of Confederate missiles. They no longer inspired confidence,
but begot apprehension; and it was with grim satisfaction that I saw the
carriage of one and another smashed into matchwood by a whooping shot and
bundled out of the line.

X

The dense forests wholly or partly in which were fought so many battles of
the Civil War, lay upon the earth in each autumn a thick deposit of dead
leaves and stems, the decay of which forms a soil of surprising depth and
richness. In dry weather the upper stratum is as inflammable as tinder. A
fire once kindled in it will spread with a slow, persistent advance as far
as local conditions permit, leaving a bed of light ashes beneath which the
less combustible accretions of previous years will smolder until
extinguished by rains. In many of the engagements of the war the fallen
leaves took fire and roasted the fallen men. At Shiloh, during the first
day's fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and
scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I
remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have
described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of
an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was
destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been
relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for
no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death
and gratify a reprehensible curiosity.

Forbidding enough it was in every way. The fire had swept every
superficial foot of it, and at every step I sank into ashes to the ankle.
It had contained a thick undergrowth of young saplings, every one of which
had been severed by a bullet, the foliage of the prostrate tops being
afterward burnt and the stumps charred. Death had put his sickle into this
thicket and fire had gleaned the field. Along a line which was not that of
extreme depression, but was at every point significantly equidistant from
the heights on either hand, lay the bodies, half buried in ashes; some in