hed. And many, alas! hear not the roar as they
stretch upon the ground with upturned faces and open eyes, though a
shell should burst at their very ears. Their ears and their bodies this
instant are only mud. We saw them but a moment since there among the
flame, with brawny arms and muscles of iron wielding the rammer and
pushing home the cannon's plethoric load.

Strange freaks these round shot play! We saw a man coming up from the
rear with his full knapsack on, and some canteens of water held by the
straps in his hands. He was walking slowly and with apparent unconcern,
though the iron hailed around him. A shot struck the knapsack, and it,
and its contents flew thirty yards in every direction, the knapsack
disappearing like an egg, thrown spitefully against a rock. The soldier
stopped and turned about in puzzled surprise, put up one hand to his
back to assure himself that the knapsack was not there, and then walked
slowly on again unharmed, with not even his coat torn. Near us was a man
crouching behind a small disintegrated stone, which was about the size
of a common water bucket. He was bent up, with his face to the ground,
in the attitude of a Pagan worshipper before his idol. It looked so
absurd to see him thus, that I went and said to him, "Do not lie there
like a toad. Why not go to your regiment and be a man?" He turned up his
face with a stupid, terrified look upon me, and then without a word
turned his nose again to the ground. An orderly that was with me at the
time, told me a few moments later, that a shot struck the stone,
smashing it in a thousand fragments, but did not touch the man, though
his head was not six inches from the stone.

All the projectiles that came near us were not so harmless. Not ten
yards away from us a shell burst among some small bushes, where sat
three or four orderlies holding horses. Two of the men and one horse
were killed. Only a few yards off a shell exploded over an open limber
box in Cushing's battery, and at the same instant, another shell over a
neighboring box. In both the boxes the ammunition blew up with an
explosion that shook the ground, throwing fire and splinters and shells
far into the air and all around, and destroying several men. We watched
the shells bursting in the air, as they came hissing in all directions.
Their flash was a bright gleam of lightning radiating from a point,
giving place in the thousandth part of a second to a small, white, puffy
cloud, like