m fog-ringed lanterns flickered
feebly here and there like wounded fireflies over the dark piles on the
ground.

The Southern ambulance corps did its best at its new trade. Their long
lines of wagons began to creep into Richmond and fill the hospitals.
Shivering white-faced women, wives, sweethearts, mothers, sisters were
there looking for their own, praying and hoping. All day they had
shivered in their rooms at the deep boom of cannon, whose thunder
rattled the glass in the windows through which they gazed on the
deserted streets. It was the first lesson in real war, this hand to hand
grip of the two giants whose struggle must decide the fate of Richmond.

The wagons left their loads and rattled back over the rough cobble
stones and out on the muddy roads to the front again. The night would be
all too short for their work.

In their field hospital, the surgeons, with bare, bloody arms, were busy
with knife and saw. Boys who had faced death in battle without a tremor,
now pale and trembling, watched the growing pile of legs and arms. Alone
in the darkness beyond the voice or touch of a loved hand they must face
this awful thing and hobble through life maimed wrecks. They looked
over their shoulders into the murky darkness and envied the silent forms
that lay there beyond the reach of pain and despair. All night the grim
tragedy of the knife and saw, and the low moans that still came from the
darkness of the woods!

Sunday morning, the second day of June, dawned over the battle-scarred
earth--an ominous day for the armies of the Republic--for the sun rose
on a new figure in command of the men in grey. Robert E. Lee had taken
the place of Joseph E. Johnston.

General G. W. Smith, second in command when Johnston fell, had formed
his plan of battle, and the new head of the Confederacy, with his high
sense of courtesy and justice, permitted his subordinate to direct the
conflict for the day.

As the sun rose, red and ominous through the dark pine forest, General
Smith quickly advanced his men at Fair Oaks Station, down the railroad,
and fell with fury on the men in blue, who crouched behind the
embankment. The men were less than fifty yards apart, and muskets blazed
in long level sheets of yellow flame. No longer could the ear catch the
effect of ripping canvas in the fire of small arms. The roar was
endless. For an hour and a half the two blazing lines mowed each other
down in their tracks without pause. The grey at