gades, was about a mile and a half long,
both flanks on the river, above and below the town--a mere bridge-head. It
did not look a very formidable obstacle to the march of an army of more
than forty thousand men. In a more tranquil temper than his failure at
Spring Hill had put him into Hood would probably have passed around our
left and turned us out with ease--which would justly have entitled him to
the Humane Society's great gold medal. Apparently that was not his day for
saving life.

About the middle of the afternoon our field-glasses picked up the
Confederate head-of-column emerging from the range of hills previously
mentioned, where it is cut by the Columbia road. But--ominous
circumstance!--it did not come on. It turned to its left, at a right
angle, moving along the base of the hills, parallel to our line. Other
heads-of-column came through other gaps and over the crests farther along,
impudently deploying on the level ground with a spectacular display of
flags and glitter of arms. I do not remember that they were molested, even
by the guns of General Wagner, who had been foolishly posted with two
small brigades across the turnpike, a half-mile in our front, where he was
needless for apprisal and powerless for resistance. My recollection is
that our fellows down there in their shallow trenches noted these
portentous dispositions without the least manifestation of incivility. As
a matter of fact, many of them were permitted by their compassionate
officers to sleep. And truly it was good weather for that: sleep was in
the very atmosphere. The sun burned crimson in a gray-blue sky through a
delicate Indian-summer haze, as beautiful as a day-dream in paradise. If
one had been given to moralizing one might have found material a-plenty
for homilies in the contrast between that peaceful autumn afternoon and
the bloody business that it had in hand. If any good chaplain failed to
"improve the occasion" let us hope that he lived to lament in
sack-cloth-of-gold and ashes-of-roses his intellectual unthrift.

The putting of that army into battle shape--its change from columns into
lines--could not have occupied more than an hour or two, yet it seemed an
eternity. Its leisurely evolutions were irritating, but at last it moved
forward with atoning rapidity and the fight was on. First, the storm
struck Wagner's isolated brigades, which, vanishing in fire and smoke,
instantly reappeared as a confused mass of fugitives inextrica