lished a great deal with little loss.

General Grant heard the firing at Savannah, ten miles down the river. It
was so constant and heavy that he understood at once it was an attack.
He sent a messenger post haste to General Buell, whose advance was ten
miles east of Savannah, and then hastened to Pittsburg on a steamboat.
He arrived on the ground about nine o'clock. Up to that hour there was
no commander-in-chief, but each division commander gave such orders as
he thought best. There was but little unity of action. Each commander
was impressed with a sense of danger, and each was doing his best to
hold the enemy in check.

The wide gap between Prentiss and Sherman, and the quick routing of
Prentiss's regiments, enabled Hardee to push his middle brigades to the
centre of the Union army without much opposition. Both of Hardee's
flanks had been held back by the stout fight of Sherman on one side, the
weaker resistance of Prentiss on the other. This gradually made the
Rebel force into the form of a wedge, and at the moment when Hurlburt
was waiting for their advance, the point of the wedge had penetrated
beyond Hurlburt's right, but there it came against General W. H. L.
Wallace's division.

When Hurlburt notified Wallace that Prentiss was attacked, that noble
commander ordered his division under arms. You remember his position,
near Snake Creek, and nearer the Pittsburg Landing than any other
division. He at once moved in the direction of the firing, which brought
him west of Hurlburt's position.

You remember that General McClernand had sent three regiments to General
Sherman, and that they were obliged to change front. Having done that,
he moved his other two brigades, the first under the command of Colonel
Hare, including the Eighth and Eighteenth Illinois infantry and the
Eleventh and Thirteenth Iowa, with Dresser's battery, and the third
brigade with Schwartz's and McAllister's batteries. It was a complete
change of front. These movements of Wallace and McClernand were directly
against the two sides and the point of the wedge which Hardee was
driving. Wallace marched southwest, and McClernand swung round facing
southeast. They came up just in season to save Sherman from being cut
off and also to save Veatch's brigade of Hurlburt's division from being
overwhelmed.

McClernand's head-quarters were in an old cotton-field. The camps of his
regiments extended across the field and into the forest on both sides.
He es