over my head. It was slow and painful work, as you can imagine, but at
last, by dint of perseverance, I had dragged myself away to the left
of the direct range of the batteries, and, creeping to the verge of the
wood, looked off over the green slope. I understood by the crash and
roar of the guns, the yells and cheers of the men, and that hoarse
murmur which those who have been in battle know, but which I can not
describe in words, that there was hot work going on out there; but
never have I seen, no, not in that three days' desperate melee at the
Wilderness, nor at that terrific repulse we had at Cold Harbor, such
absolute slaughter as I saw that afternoon on the green slope of Malvern
Hill. The guns of the entire army were massed on the crest, and thirty
thousand of our infantry lay, musket in hand, in front. For eight
hundred yards the hill sank in easy declension to the wood, and across
this smooth expanse the Rebs must charge to reach our lines. It was
nothing short of downright insanity to order men to charge that hill;
and so his generals told Lee, but he would not listen to reason that
day, and so he sent regiment after regiment, and brigade after brigade,
and division after division, to certain death. Talk about Grant's
disregard of human life, his efforts at Cold Harbor--and I ought to
know, for I got a Minie in my shoulder that day--was hopeful and easy
work to what Lee laid on Hill's and Ma-gruder's divisions at Malvern. It
was at the close of the second charge, when the yelling mass reeled back
from before the blaze of those sixty guns and thirty thousand rifles,
even as they began to break and fly backward toward the woods, that
I saw from the spot where I lay a riderless horse break out of the
confused and flying mass, and, with mane and tail erect and spreading
nostril, come dashing obliquely down the slope. Over fallen steeds and
heaps of the dead she leaped with a motion as airy as that of the flying
fox when, fresh and unjaded, he leads away from the hounds, whose sudden
cry has broken him off from hunting mice amid the bogs of the meadow. So
this riderless horse came vaulting along. Now from my earliest boyhood I
have had what horsemen call a 'weakness' for horses. Only give me a colt
of wild, irregular temper and fierce blood to tame, and I am perfectly
happy. Never did lash of mine, singing with cruel sound through the air,
fall on such a colt's soft hide. Never did yell or kick send his
hot blood