ss and a fierce July sun, watching white smoke-lines of
crackling infantry multiply in the landscape or bursting shells make
white smoke-rings in the bright air, and to listen helplessly to the
boom, hurtle and boom of other artilleries and the far away cheering and
counter-cheering of friend and foe. Yonder in the far east glimmered
Centerville, its hitherward roads, already in the sabbath sunrise, full
of brave bluecoats choking with Virginia dust and throwing away their
hot blankets as they came. Here she made out Stone Bridge, guarded by a
brigade called Jackson's; here, crossing it east and west, the Warrenton
turnpike, and yonder north of them that rise of dust above the trees
which meant a flanking Federal column and crept westward as Evans
watched it, toward Sudley Springs, ford, mill, and church, where already
much blue infantry had stolen round by night from Centerville. Here,
leading south from these, she descried the sunken Sudley road, that with
a dip and a rise crossed the turnpike and Young's Branch. There eastward
of it the branch turned north-east and then southeast between those
sloping fields beyond which Evans and Wheat were presently fighting
Burnside; through which Bee, among bursting shells, pressed to their aid
against such as Keyes and Sherman, and back over which, after a long,
hot struggle, she could see--could hear--the aiders and the aided swept
in one torn, depleted tumult, shattered, confounded, and made the more
impotent by their own clamor. Here was the many-ravined, tree-dotted,
southward rise by which, in concave line, the Northern brigades and
batteries, pressing across the bends of the branch, advanced to the
famed Henry house plateau--that key of victory where by midday fell all
the horrid weight of the battle; where the guns of Ricketts and Griffen
for the North and of Walton and Imboden for the South crashed and mowed,
and across and across which the opposing infantries volleyed and bled,
screamed, groaned, swayed, and drove each other, staggered, panted,
rallied, cheered, and fell or fought on among the fallen. Here cried Bee
to the dazed crowd, "Look at Jackson's brigade standing like a stone
wall." Here Beauregard and Johnson formed their new front of half a
dozen states on Alabama's colours, and here a bit later the Creole
general's horse was shot under him. Northward here, down the slope and
over the branch, rolled the conflict, and there on the opposite rise,
among his routed