im on the field he
began to form his lines anew and strengthen the weaker points.

Yet the condition of his army would have appalled a weaker will. It had
been driven back three miles. His whole camp had been taken. His second
line also had been driven in. Many thousands of men had fallen and other
thousands had been taken. Thirty of his cannon were in the hands of the
enemy, and although noon had now come and gone there was no sound to
betoken the coming of the troops led by Wallace or Nelson. Well might
Grant's own stout heart have shrunk appalled from the task before him.

Wallace was held back by confused orders, pardonable at such a time.
The eager Nelson was detained at Savannah by Buell, who thought that
the sounds of the engagement they heard in the Shiloh woods was a minor
affair, and who wanted Nelson to wait for boats to take him there.

It seemed sometimes to Dick long afterward, when the whole of the great
Shiloh battle became clear, that Fortune was merely playing a game of
chess, with the earth as a board, and the armies as pawns. Grant's army
was ambushed with its general absent. The other armies which were almost
at hand were delayed for one reason or another. While as for the South,
the genius that had planned the attack and that had carried it forward
was quenched in death, when victory was at its height.

But for the present the lad had little time for such thoughts as these.
The success of Sherman in holding the new position infused new courage
into him and those around him. The men in gray, wearied with their
immense exertions, and having suffered frightful losses themselves,
abated somewhat the energy and fierceness of their attack.

The dissolved Northern regiments had time to reform. Grant seized a
new position along a line of hills, in front of which ran a deep ravine
filled with brushwood. He and his officers appreciated the advantage and
they massed the troops there as fast as they could.

Now Fortune, after having brought Grant to the verge of the pit, was
disposed to throw chances in his way. The hills and the ravine were
one. Another, and most important it was, was the presence of guns of
the heaviest calibre landed some days ago from the fleet, and left there
until their disposition could be determined. A quick-witted colonel,
Webster by name, gathered up all the gunners who had lost their own
guns and who had been driven back in the retreat, and manned this great
battery of siege gu