For this powerful army, moving in battle order through a forest, has met
with a formidable obstacle - the open country. The crest of that gentle
hill a mile away has a sinister look; it says, Beware! Along it runs a
stone wall extending to left and right a great distance. Behind the wall
is a hedge; behind the hedge are seen the tops of trees in rather
straggling order. Among the trees - what? It is necessary to know.

Yesterday, and for many days and nights previously, we were fighting
somewhere; always there was cannonading, with occasional keen rattlings
of musketry, mingled with cheers, our own or the enemy's, we seldom
knew, attesting some temporary advantage. This morning at daybreak the
enemy was gone. We have moved forward across his earthworks, across
which we have so often vainly attempted to move before, through the
debris of his abandoned camps, among the graves of his fallen, into the
woods beyond.

How curiously we regarded everything! How odd it all seemed! Nothing
appeared quite familiar; the most commonplace objects - an old saddle, a
splintered wheel, a forgotten canteen everything related something of
the mysterious personality of those strange men who had been killing us.
The soldier never becomes wholly familiar with the conception of his
foes as men like himself; he cannot divest himself of the feeling that
they are another order of beings, differently conditioned, in an
environment not altogether of the earth. The smallest vestiges of them
rivet his attention and engage his interest. He thinks of them as
inaccessible; and, catching an unexpected glimpse of them, they appear
farther away, and therefore larger, than they really are - like objects
in a fog. He is somewhat in awe of them.

From the edge of the wood leading up the acclivity are the tracks of