The blue, assaulting force, the blue reserves, the division commanders, drew shoulders together, brows together, and looked across and upward doubtfully enough at the bluffs they were expected to take. Wade the bayou, break through the cane, cross that narrow front of brush and morass, attack at the apex of a triangle whose base and sides were held by an unknown number of desperate Rebels defending Vicksburg, a place that had got the name for obstinacy!—the blue troops and their generals, however hard they tried, could not at all visualize success. All the prospect,—the opposite height and the small grey batteries, the turbid, winding waters and the woods so strange to Northern eyes,—all was hostile, lowering. Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa drew uneasy breath, it was so sinister a place! An officer came from Sherman to the senior division commander. “General Sherman says, sir, that you will order the assault.” “It’s a bad place—” “Yes. He says we will lose five thousand men before we take Vicksburg and that we might as well lose them here as anywhere.” “All right. We’ll lose them all right. Tell him I’ll give the signal.” A grey rifle-pit, dug along the face of the hill, had received since dawn the attention of blue sharpshooters stationed in a distant row of moss-draped trees. The bottom of the long trench was all slippery mud, the sides were mud, the out-thrown, heaped earth atop was mud. Rest a rifle barrel upon it and the metal sank as into water. The screen of scrub along the forward rim was drenched, broken, insufficient. Through it the men in the pit looked out on a sodden world. They saw a shoulder of the hill where, in the early light, the caisson of an isolated gun had been exploded by a Federal shell. Horses and men lay beside it, mangled. Farther away yet, and earlier yet, they had seen a reconnoitring party enter a finger of land crooking toward the Federal lines, and beyond the cover of the grey guns. The blue, too, had seen, and thrusting forward a regiment cut off the grey party. The bulk of the latter hewed its way through, back to the shelter of the grey Parrotts, but there were officers and men left wounded in the wood.—The day was gloomy, gloomy! The smoke from Stephen Lee’s guns and from the answering Federal batteries hung clogged and indiffusible, dark and hard. “Somebody’s going to get hurt this day,” said the men in the rifle-pits. “There ain’t any joke about this place.” “Do you know I think they’re going to charge us? Just as brave as they are foolish!” “I don’t think much of Sherman’s capacities as a general. Grant’s the better man.” “They’re getting ready.—Well, I always did hate waste, whatever colour it was dressed in!” “My God! Even their bugles don’t sound cheerful!— _Chickasaw—Chickasaw Bayou The death of you—the death of you!_”