On the thirteenth of June grey countermines were begun from all the main grey works. The men worked continuously upon these, and in the night-time they strengthened the breaches made by the daily fierce cannonade. With the few hundred entrenching tools, with the improvised spades, the bayonet picks, with earth carried in camp-buckets, with all ingenious makeshifts, they burrowed and heaped continuously. But they laboured, now, somewhat weakly. They were so tired. The heat of that Southern land was frightful, and the confinement in the trenches was frightful. The thought began to sicken at those deep troughs in the earth. In the scanty sleep of officers and men they pressed upon the brain; they grew to seem trenches in the brains, troughs filled with dead thoughts, thoughts that still suffered. There was no relief from the trenches, no relief at all, except when a wound came—a bad wound—or fever came—serious fever with delirium—when the wounded or the fevered was borne with some risk from shells and minies to the hospital. Even in the hospital the trenches stayed in the brain. It came that, in the trenches, the tired, tired soldiers looked with something like envy upon the wounded or the fevered as he was borne away. “That fellow’s going to get some sleep.”—“Stop your nodding, Jimmy!—nodding same as if you were in church!”—“Captain’s calling!”—“Go ’way! If you jerk your head back like that you’ll break your neck.”—“I wouldn’t care,” said Jimmy, “if it just meant sleeping on and on.”—“It wouldn’t. You’d be fighting again somewhere else in a jiffy!—O God! these trenches.” Officers and men were dead for sleep. Officers and men had never dreamed of such fatigue. Officers and men handled sword and musket with hands that were hard to keep ennerved and watched the foe with eyes over which the lids would droop. It was growing ghastly at Vicksburg, and the June sun beat down, beat down. In the infrequent times when the river was clear of smoke it lay glittering like diamonds and topazes, paining the weary eye. North and east and south the cloud rarely lifted. A thinner battle cloud overhung the seven-mile Confederate line. The grey could not spend powder as might the blue, nor did they have the blue’s great horde of guns. But what with the blue and what with the grey all Vicksburg and its environs dwelled day after day, week after week, in a battle murk. The smoke was always there; the smell, the taste, were always there. The pitiless sun was no less hot for the ashen gauze through which it struck. Shorn of its beams, it rose and moved through the muddy blue, and set like a thick red-gold buckler, from behind which came lances of heat and madness. With the night there came drenching dews and the mist from the river. Heat and cold beat on the same men, cramped forever in the same trenches.