The soldiers who might sleep, slept on their arms, under a sulphurous canopy. All the forest hereabouts was thick with brushwood and summer-parched. It burned in a hundred places. The details, gathering the wounded, carried torches. It was lurid enough, all the far-flung field. There were very many wounded, many dead. Blue and grey alike heard the groaning of their fallen. _Ahh! ahhh!_ groaned the forest. And the word that was always heard, as soon as the guns were silent, was heard now, steady as cicadas in a grove. _Water! Water! Water! Water! Water!_ There was a moon, but not plainly seen because of the gauze that was over the earth. A chill and restless night it was, filled with comings and goings, and movements of large bodies of troops. Just before midnight Longstreet appeared in person. The weary grey railroad had brought him, in the afternoon, to Catoosa platform, near Ringgold. With two aides he took horse at once and pushed out toward the field of action. But the woods were thick and the roads an unmarked tangle. He came at last upon the field and met General Bragg at midnight. Behind him, yet upon the road, were three brigades of Hood’s division and Kershaw’s and Humphrey’s, of McLaws’s. There was a council of war. It was understood, it was in the air, that the past day had been but a prelude. Now Bragg announced to his officers a change of plan. The Army of Tennessee was divided into two wings. The right was composed of Walker’s and Hill’s corps, Cheatham’s division, and the cavalry of Forrest. Leonidas Polk commanded here. The left was formed by Hood’s and Buckner’s corps, the division of Hindman, and Joe Wheeler’s cavalry, and Longstreet commanded this wing. “And the plan of attack?” “As it was to-day. Successive pushes from right to left. The attack to begin at daylight.” But daylight was not far away, and the movements to be made were many. The sun was above the tree-tops when Breckinridge advanced upon the Chattanooga road and opened the battle of the twentieth. “Sunday,” said the men. “Going to church—going to church—going to a little mountain church! Going to be singing—Minie singing. Going to be preaching—big gun preaching. We’ve got what the General calls a _ponshon_ for Sunday service.... Lot of dead people in this wood. Haven’t you ever noticed how much worse a half-burned cabin looks than one burned right down? That one over there—it looks as if home was still a-lingering around. Go ’way! it does! You boys haven’t got no imagination.—No imagination—no imagination—No shoes and pretty nearly no breakfast.... I wish this here dust was imagination— “The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home; ’T is summer, the darkies are gay, The corn-top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom, While the birds make music all the day.”