The regiment moved forward. The woods on Kennesaw were afire. That night, from the house near Smyrna Church, Désirée watched the line of flame. She stood with three women in a cotton-field and watched. One of the women was old, and her sons were there where the flame was. She rocked herself to and fro, and she beat her hands together and she cursed war. One of the women had a babe in her arms. It wailed, and she opened her dress, and put her breast to its mouth. The wind loosened her hair. It blew about her, framing her brooding young face. Simple and straight she stood amid the cotton, giving life more life, while her dark eyes were filled with the image of death. The wind blew the smoke over the cotton-fields; to the women’s ears it brought alike the groaning. Two days later, Sherman in Georgia, like Grant in Virginia, resorted again to a turning movement. South and east he pushed his right, until it threatened to crook between Johnston and Atlanta. Johnston lifted the Army of Tennessee from Kennesaw and set it down at Smyrna Church. In its rear now was the Chattahoochee, its bridges covered by the Georgia militia. A very few miles behind the Chattahoochee was Atlanta, fairly fortified. Smyrna Church and Station saw heavy, continued skirmishing. On the fourth, Sherman pushed Schofield and McPherson yet farther south, curving like a scimitar upon the Smyrna position. His advance thrust the Georgia militia back to Nickajack Ridge, baring the approach to the river. That night Johnston moved from Smyrna and took up position on the north bank of Chattahoochee. Here were works prepared in advance, and here for several days the hours were filled with skirmishing. Sherman had brought up, hot foot, the remainder of the blue army from Kennesaw. “We ought,” he says, “to have caught Johnston on this retreat, but he had prepared the way too well.”