ee the flashes of the guns, and the faces of the
enemy, here and there.

The Colonel described the approach of his regiment. They lay down for a
moment in a swamp, and the minie-balls sang like swarming bees, and
split the blades of the grass above them. Then they charged, over
ground that ran with human blood. In the trenches the bodies of dead
and dying men lay three deep, and were trampled out of sight in the mud
by the feet of those who fought. They would crouch behind the works,
lifting their guns high over their heads, and firing into the throngs
on the other side; again and again men sprang upon the breastworks and
fired their muskets, and then fell dead. They dragged up cannon, one
after another, and blew holes through the logs, and raked the' ground
with charges of canister.

While the Colonel read, still in his calm, matter-of-fact voice, you
might see men leaning forward in their chairs, hands clenched, teeth
set. They knew! They knew! Had there ever before been a time in history
when breastworks had been charged by artillery? Twenty-four men in the
crew of one gun, and only two unhurt! One iron sponge-bucket with
thirty-nine bullet holes shot through it! And then blasts of canister
sweeping the trenches, and blowing scores of living and dead men to
fragments! And into this hell of slaughter new regiments charging, in
lines four deep! And squad after squad of the enemy striving to
surrender, and shot to pieces by their own comrades as they clambered
over the blood-soaked walls! And heavy timbers in the defences shot to
splinters! Huge oak trees--one of them twenty-four inches in
diameter--crashing down upon the combatants, gnawed through by
rifle-bullets! Since the world began had men ever fought like that?

Then the Colonel told of his own wound in the shoulder, and how, toward
dusk, he had crawled away; and how he became lost, and strayed into the
enemy's line, and was thrust into a batch of prisoners and marched to
the rear. And then of the night that he spent beside a hospital camp in
the Wilderness, where hundreds of wounded and dying men lay about on
the rain-soaked ground, moaning, screaming, praying to be killed. Again
the prisoners were moved, having been ordered to march to the railroad;
and on the way the Colonel went blind from suffering and exhaustion,
and staggered and fell in the road. You could have heard a pin drop in
the room, in the pause between sentences in his story, as he told how
th