he twelfth hour,
he sent two brigades, French and Meagher.

Night fell, black as pitch. The forest sprang dense, from miry soil. The
region was one where Nature set traps. In the darkness it was not easy
to tell friend from foe. Grey fired on grey, blue on blue. The blue
still pressed, here in disorder, here with a steady front, toward the
grapevine bridge across the Chickahominy. French and Meagher arrived to
form a strong rearguard. Behind, on the plateau, the grey advance
paused, uncertain in the darkness and in its mortal fatigue. Here, and
about the marshy creek and on the vast dim field beyond, beneath the
still hanging battle cloud, lay, of the grey and the blue, fourteen
thousand dead and wounded. The sound of their suffering rose like a
monotonous wind of the night.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

The Stonewall Brigade, a unit in Jackson's advance, halted on the
plateau near the McGehee house. All was dark, all was confused. In the
final and general charge, regiments had become separated from brigades,
companies from regiments. Fragments of many commands were on the
plateau,--Whiting, Ewell, D. H. Hill, Jackson's own division, portions
of Longstreet's brigades, even a number of A. P. Hill's broken,
exhausted fighters. Many an officer lay silent or moaning, on the
scarped slope, in the terrific tangle about the creek, or on the
melancholy plain beyond. Captains shouted orders in the colonels'
places; lieutenants or sergeants in the captains'. Here, on the plateau,
where for hours the blue guns had thundered, the stars were seen but
dimly through the smoke. Bodies of men, and men singly or in twos and
threes, wandered like ghosts in Hades. "This way, Second Virginia!"
"Fall in here, Hood's Texans!"--"Hampton's men, over here!"--"Fifteenth
Alabama! Fifteenth Alabama!"--"I'm looking for the Milledgeville
Hornets."--"Iverson's men! Iverson's men!"--"Fall in here, Cary's
Legion!"--"First Maryland!"--"Fifth Virginia over here!"--"Where in hell
is the Eleventh Mississippi!"--"Lawton! Lawton!"--"Sixty-fifth Virginia,
fall in here!"

East and south, sloping toward the Chickahominy, ran several miles of
heavy forest. It was filled with sound,--the hoofs of horses, the
rumbling of wheels, the breaking through undergrowth of masses of
men,--sound that was dying in volume, rolling toward the Chickahominy.
On the trampled brow of the plateau, beneath shot-riddled trees, General
D. H. Hill, coming from th