e of
old men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each
now but one of the common herd, and each against all, shouldering,
sweating, and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and
reader of the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed and
wounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days' battle, and many
an infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides Anna, was
second-sighted enough to see, night and day, night and day, the muddy
labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide,
unbroken reaches of dense timber--with their deep ravines, their long
ridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs--in the day's journey
from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty,
nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or the
unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun "citizen" or by
scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent,
tangled, armed host--cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries,
battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and
their guns, and all the "big generals" and their smart escorts and busy
staffs: Saw the various columns impeding each other, taking wrong ways
and losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys,
footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate their
five-days' food in one, or threw it away to lighten the march, and
toiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the note of a horn or
drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming.

They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a wife and
mother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast, stealthy, fireless
bivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the enemy's tattoo, unsheltered
from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves: Saw, just in the
bivouac's tortuous front, softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge,
rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about
Shiloh's log meeting-house, where the victorious Grant's
ten-thousands--from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions in
lair--lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked by
swollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, but
without one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper of
warning.

Amid the eager carriage talk,