r suppers on the enemy's ground."

"That's all he wants to know."

As Harry rode back he saw that the first fires were spreading, passing
over new portions of the battlefield. Sparks flew in myriads and fine,
thin ashes were mingled with the powder smoke. The small trees, burnt
through, fell with a crash, and the flames ran as if they were alive up
boughs. Other trees fell too, cut through by cannon balls, and some were
actually mown down by sheets of bullets, as if they had been grass.

His way now led through human wreckage, made all the more appalling by an
approaching twilight, heavy with fumes and smoke, and reddened with the
cannon and rifle blaze. His frightened horse pulled wildly at the bit,
and tried to run away, but Harry held him to the path, although he
stepped more than once in hot ashes and sprang wildly. The dead were
thick too and Harry was in horror lest the hoof of his horse be planted
upon some unheeding face.

He knew that the day was waning fast and that the dark was due in some
degree to the setting sun, and not wholly to the smoke and ashes.
Yet the fury of the battle was sustained. The southern left maintained
the ground that it had gained, and in the center and right it could not
be driven back. It became obvious to Grant that Lee was not to be beaten
in the Wilderness. His advance suffered from all kinds of disadvantages.
In the swamps and thickets he could mass neither his guns nor his cannon.
Communications were broken, the telegraph wires could be used but little
and as the twilight darkened to night he let the attack die.

Harry was back with the commander-in-chief, when the great battle of the
Wilderness, one of the fiercest ever fought, sank under cover of the
night. It was not open and spectacular like Gettysburg, but it had a
gloomy and savage grandeur all its own. Grant had learned, like the
others before him, that he could not drive headlong over Lee, but sitting
in silence by his campfire, chewing his cigar, he had no thought, unlike
the others, of turning back. Nearly twenty thousand of his men had
fallen, but huge resources and a President who supported him absolutely
were behind him and he was merely planning a new method of attack.

In the Southern camp there was exultation, but it was qualified and
rather grim. These men, veterans of many battles and able to judge for
themselves, believed that they had won the victory, but they knew that it
was by no means deci