bly
intermingled with their pursuers. They had not stayed the advance a
moment, and as might have been foreseen were now a peril to the main line,
which could protect itself only by the slaughter of its friends. To the
right and left, however, our guns got into play, and simultaneously a
furious infantry fire broke out along the entire front, the paralyzed
center excepted. But nothing could stay those gallant rebels from a
hand-to-hand encounter with bayonet and butt, and it was accorded to them
with hearty good-will.

Meantime Wagner's conquerors were pouring across the breastwork like water
over a dam. The guns that had spared the fugitives had now no time to
fire; their infantry supports gave way and for a space of more than two
hundred yards in the very center of our line the assailants, mad with
exultation, had everything their own way. From the right and the left
their gray masses converged into the gap, pushed through, and then,
spreading, turned our men out of the works so hardly held against the
attack in their front. From our viewpoint on the bluff we could mark the
constant widening of the gap, the steady encroachment of that blazing and
smoking mass against its disordered opposition.

"It is all up with us," said Captain Dawson, of Wood's staff; "I am going
to have a quiet smoke."

I do not doubt that he supposed himself to have borne the heat and burden
of the strife. In the midst of his preparations for a smoke he paused and
looked again--a new tumult of musketry had broken loose. Colonel Emerson
Opdycke had rushed his reserve brigade into the _melee_ and was bitterly
disputing the Confederate advantage. Other fresh regiments joined in the
countercharge, commanderless groups of retreating men returned to their
work, and there ensued a hand-to-hand contest of incredible fury. Two
long, irregular, mutable, and tumultuous blurs of color were consuming
each other's edge along the line of contact. Such devil's work does not
last long, and we had the great joy to see it ending, not as it began, but
"more nearly to the heart's desire." Slowly the mobile blur moved away
from the town, and presently the gray half of it dissolved into its
elemental units, all in slow recession. The retaken guns in the embrasures
pushed up towering clouds of white smoke; to east and to west along the
reoccupied parapet ran a line of misty red till the spitfire crest was
without a break from flank to flank. Probably there was some Y