h man for
himself, _Yaai, Yai ... Yaai, Yaai, Yai.... Yaai!_ That
cry was to be heard on more than two thousand battlefields.
It lasts with the voice of Stentor, and with the horn of Roland.
It has gone down to history as the "Rebel yell."

As they reached the oak woods Kirby Smith was shot. Desperately wounded,
he fell from his horse. Elzey took command; the troops swept out by the
Chinn House upon the plateau. Beckham's battery unlimbered and came,
with decisive effect, into action.

McDowell, with a last desperate rally, formed a line of battle, a
gleaming, formidable crescent, half hid by a cloud of skirmishers. Out
of the woods by the Chinn House now came Jubal Early, with Kemper's 7th
Virginia, Harry Hays's Louisianians, and Barksdale's 13th Mississippi.
They took position under fire and opened upon the enemy's right. As they
did so Elzey's brigade, the 10th Virginia, the 1st Maryland, the 3d
Tennessee, the 8th and 2d South Carolina, the 18th and 28th Virginia,
and Hampton's and Cary's legions charged. The First Brigade came down
upon the guns for the third time, and held them. Stuart, standing in his
stirrups and chanting his commands, rounded the base of the hill, and
completed the rout.

The Federals turned. Almost to a man their officers did well. There were
many privates of a like complexion. Sykes' Regulars, not now upon the
Henry Hill, but massed across the branch, behaved throughout the day
like trained and disciplined soldiers. No field could have witnessed
more gallant conduct than that of Griffin and Ricketts. Heintzleman had
been conspicuously energetic, Franklin and Willcox had done their best.
McDowell himself had not lacked in dash and grit, nor, to say sooth, in
strategy. It was the Federal tactics that were at fault. But all the
troops, barring Sykes and Ricketts and the quite unused cavalry, were
raw, untried, undisciplined. Few were good marksmen, and, to tell the
truth, few were possessed of a patriotism that would stand strain. That
virtue awoke later in the Army of the Potomac; it was not present in
force on the field of Bull Run. Many were three-months men, their term
of service about to expire, and in their minds no slightest intention of
reenlistment. They were close kin to the troops whose term expiring on
the eve of battle had this morning "marched to the rear to the sound of
the enemy's cannon." Many were men and boys merely out for a lark and
almost ludicrously astonished at the nat