desperation.

At this moment, too, a new element of terror and destruction broke
suddenly into the conflict. As if the powers of the air had indeed begun
to take part in the struggle, fiery meteors fell out of the air, from a
direction not commanded by the Federal batteries--fiery meteors before
which whole ranks of men seemed like stubble before the scythe. One of
them would fall hissing through the air, burst with a horrible
explosion, and the moment after nothing would remain of the ranks of
rebels within thirty or forty feet of it, but a mass of shattered and
mangled fragments, limbs torn from limbs and heads from bodies. At first
the rebels could not understand the meaning of this new and awful
visitation, and even the Union troops were not for the time aware what
new power had come to their aid, destroying more of the enemy at a blow
than their heaviest and best-served batteries. But the signal officer on
the gable of the old mansion on Malvern Hill saw, and soon communicated
the fact to the officers in command--that the gun-boats Galena and
Aroostook (not the Monitor, as has been sometimes reported), had steamed
up from their anchorage at Curl's Neck, two miles below, and opened
furious broadsides of shell from their heavy rifled guns. These shells
were the terrible missiles working that untold destruction in the rebel
ranks; and the horrors and dangers of the fight to them must have been
intensely aggravated by these fiery monsters that came tearing and
shrieking through the forest and exploded with concussions that shook
the earth like discharges from whole batteries. Only after the battle
was over could the ravages made by this agency be fully appreciated,
from the effects produced on natural objects lying in the line of their
course. In many places, avenues rods long and many feet in width, were
cut through the tree-tops and branches; and in not a few instances,
great trees, three and four feet in diameter, were burst open from
branch to root, split to shreds and scattered in splinters in all
directions.

Panting, swearing, whooping and bleeding, the Confederate lines had been
pushed on, until they had reached a point nearly as far in advance as in
the former attack. But here, beneath the storm of canister, case-shot
and grape-shot, solid-shot, shell and musketry, human endurance failed
and even the madness of intoxication grew useless. The hurricane of
metal was too deadly for mortal man to withstand. No ef