s of another caliber shells fly over the wall of blue.
In a moment the ground of the plateau is torn, the red clay flying far
into the air. But now the blue wall is girdling the very crest of the
hill; it stops, shrivels. Long gaps are cut in its broken surface. The
hillside is dotted with sprawling figures. The crest is a ragged edge of
writhing bodies and struggling limbs. Forward! The wall is advancing,
but shorter. It is within reach of the shining guns--spouting flame and
iron in the very face of the dauntless wall. Then there is a pause. The
smoke hides everything but the maimed and quivering heaps that strive to
crawl backward, back to the crest, back to the deeps that are not rest
nor security. The hillside is like a field, covered with sheaved
grain--with a thousand mangled bodies that had been men.

Then to these wrestling specters--for in the dim smoke and Tartarean
atmosphere the actions of loading and aiming take the shape of huge
writhing, convulsing, monstrous, grappling--come quick-moving lines of
help. They rush through them, over them. The thirteen cannon behind the
struggling hydra of gray seem one vortex--sulphurous, flaming, spitting,
as from one vast mouth, scorching fire, huge mouthfuls of granite venom.
Back--back, the gray masses break in sinuous, definite, slow-yielding
disruption.

Then a sudden inrush from the left of the broken gray, where smoke and
space play fantastic tricks with the sunshine. Miraculously a dark mass
is projected on the shimmering spectrum, and a ringing voice is heard:

"We are saved; we are re-enforced. We will die here!" Then high above
the din, in the exultant tumult of the deadly won ground, the nearest in
blue hear a stentorian voice--grim, deliberate, exultant:

"Look where Jackson stands like a stone-wall! At them, men! Let us
determine to die here, and we will conquer."

Die he did, when the yelling horde in the sudden outrush grazed the edge
of the Union besom sweeping over the plain in a rush of death. Then
behind these spectral shapes came others--thousands--with wild, fierce
shouts. The blue mass is thinned to a single line. Men in command look
anxiously to the rear. Where is Burnside? Where are the twelve thousand
men whom Hunter and Heintzelman deployed in these woods two hours since?
Back, slowly, fiercely, but backward, the slender wall of blue is
forced; not defeated, but not victorious. All this Jack sees, and he
turns heartsick from the sight.

W