dead. They dragged up cannon, one after another, and blew holes
through the logs, and raked the' ground with charges of canister.

While the Colonel read, still in his calm, matter-of-fact voice, you
might see men leaning forward in their chairs, hands clenched, teeth
set. They knew! They knew! Had there ever before been a time in
history when breastworks had been charged by artillery? Twenty-four
men in the crew of one gun, and only two unhurt! One iron
sponge-bucket with thirty-nine bullet holes shot through it! And
then blasts of canister sweeping the trenches, and blowing scores of
living and dead men to fragments! And into this hell of slaughter
new regiments charging, in lines four deep! And squad after squad of
the enemy striving to surrender, and shot to pieces by their own
comrades as they clambered over the blood-soaked walls! And heavy
timbers in the defences shot to splinters! Huge oak trees--one of
them twenty-four inches in diameter--crashing down upon the
combatants, gnawed through by rifle-bullets! Since the world began
had men ever fought like that?

Then the Colonel told of his own wound in the shoulder, and how,
toward dusk, he had crawled away; and how he became lost, and
strayed into the enemy's line, and was thrust into a batch of
prisoners and marched to the rear. And then of the night that he
spent beside a hospital camp in the Wilderness, where hundreds of
wounded and dying men lay about on the rain-soaked ground, moaning,
screaming, praying to be killed. Again the prisoners were moved,
having been ordered to march to the railroad; and on the way the
Colonel went blind from suffering and exhaustion, and staggered and
fell in the road. You could have heard a pin drop in the room, in
the pause between sentences in his story, as he told how the guard