It advanced, got somehow past the crater and came to a bloody, hand-to-hand conflict with the grey. The fighting here was brutal, a maddening short war in which, black and white, the always animal struggle of war grew more animal yet. It was short. The coloured division broke and fell back into the crater.... All the grey batteries, all the grey infantry poured fire into this place where Burnside’s white and coloured troops were now inextricably mixed. At ten o’clock up came Mahone with three brigades and swept the place. By two o’clock the Confederate lines were restored and the battle of the crater ended. This day the blue had been hoist by their own petard. The next day Grant sent a flag of truce asking a cessation of hostilities until he could gather his wounded and bury the dead. Lee gave four hours. During this truce grey soldiers as well as blue pressed to the edge of the crater to observe and wonder. They were used to massacre and horror in great variety, but there was something faintly novel here. They came not ghoulishly, but good-naturedly—“just wanting to see what gunpowder could do!” They fraternized with the blue at work and the blue fraternized with them, for that was the way the grey and blue did between hostilities. They spoke the same language, they read the same Bible, they had behind them the same background of a far island home, and then of small sailing-ships at sea, and then of a new land, huge forests, Indians, wolves; at last towns and farms, roads, stages, packet-boats, and railway trains. They had to an extent the same tastes—to an extent like casts of countenance. The one used “I guess” and the other used “I reckon,” and they differed somewhat in temperament, but the innermost meaning was not far from being the same. At the worst an observer from a far country might have said, “They are half brothers.” So they fraternized during the truce, the grey this afternoon, the more triumphant, and the blue the more rueful.... “Hello, Yanks! You were going to send us to Heaven, weren’t you? and instead you got sent yourselves!”—“Never mind! better luck next time! You certainly made a fuss in the world for once!”—“How many pounds of gunpowder? ‘Eight thousand.’ Geewhilikins! That was a sizable charge!”—“If you’d been as flush of gunpowder as we are, you might have made it twenty, just as easy!”—“There’s a man buried over there—see, where the boot is sticking up!”—“Yes, you blew some of us into Heaven—twenty-two gunners, they say, and about three hundred of Elliott’s men—just enough to show your big crowd the way!”—“That junk-heap over there’s Pegram’s guns.”—“Such a mess! White men and black men and caissons and limbers.”—“I thought that body was moving; but no, it was something else.”—“Got any tobacco?”—“We’d like first-rate to trade for coffee.“—“There’s a man crying for water. Got