ure of the business. New
Englanders had come to battle as to a town meeting; placid farmers and
village youths of the Middle States had never placed in the meadows of
their imaginations events like these, while the more alert and restless
folk of the cities discovered that the newspapers had been hardly
explicit. The men of the Northwest had a more adequate conception; there
was promise in these of stark fighting. To all is to be added a rabble
of camp followers, of sutlers, musicians, teamsters, servants,
congressmen in carriages, even here and there a congressman's wife, all
the hurrah and vain parade, the strut and folly and civilian ignorance,
the unwarlike softness and the misdirected pride with which these Greeks
had set out to take in a night that four-years-distant Troy. Now a
confusion fell upon them, and a rout such as was never seen again in
that war. They left the ten guns, mute enough now, they gave no heed to
their frantic officers, they turned and fled. One moment they stood that
charge, the next the slopes of the Henry Hill were dark blue with
fugitives. There was no cohesion; mere inability to find each an
unencumbered path crowded them thus. They looked a swarm of bees, but
there was no Spirit of the Hive. The Confederate batteries strewed their
path with shot and shell, the wild and singular cry, first heard upon
that field, rang still within their ears. They reached the foot of the
hill, the Warrenton turnpike, the Sudley and Newmarket road, and the
marshy fields through which flowed Young's Branch. Up to this moment
courtesy might have called the movement a not too disorderly retreat,
but now, upon the crowded roads and through the bordering meadows, it
became mere rout, a panic quite simple, naked, and unashamed. In vain
the officers commanded and implored, in vain Sykes' Regulars took
position on the Mathews Hill, a nucleus around which the broken troops
might have reformed. The mob had neither instinct nor desire for order.
The Regulars, retreating finally with the rest, could only guard the
rear and hinder the Confederate pursuit. The panic grew. Ravens in the
air brought news, true and false, of the victors. Beckham's battery,
screaming upon the heels of the rout, was magnified a hundred-fold;
there was no doubt that battalions of artillery were hurling unknown and
deadly missiles, blocking the way to the Potomac! Jeb Stuart was
following on the Sudley Road, and another cavalry fiend--Munford--on