Edward Cary, loading his rifle, had the cartridge knocked from between his fingers by the swaying against him of the man on the right. He moved, and the corpse slid softly down upon the miry bottom of the pit. The man on the left began to talk, a slow, quiet discourse not at all interfering with eye or hand. “Western troops, I reckon! They’ve always the best sharpshooters.—Is he dead? I’m sorry. I liked Abner. He had an application in for furlough. Wife ill after the baby was born, and the doctor writing that there might be a chance to save her mind if she could see Abner. Told me last night he was sure he’d get the furlough.—Can you see for those damned bushes? There’s a perfectly hellish fuss down there.” “The guns echo so. Here they come! And God knows I am sorry for them—for Abner here and Abner there! Martin, I hate War.” “It ain’t exactly Christian, and it’s so damned avoidable.—The baby died, and I reckon his wife—and she was a sweet, pretty girl—’ll go to the Asylum at Williamsburg—” “Here they come!—Here they come!—Here they come!” ... _Fire!_ ... At last the dreadful repulse was over. Shattered, disorganized, in sullen and horrible confusion, Sherman’s brigades, the four that had charged, sank downward and back, a torn and beaten blue wave, into the dark forest beyond the bayou, the bayou whence they had come. In the water, in the mire and marsh and swamp, beside the sloughs in the forest, through the wild tangle of the abatis, over the narrow cleared ground, at the foot of the bluffs they had tried to storm, lay thick the dead and wounded. They did not number Sherman’s “five thousand,” but then neither was Vicksburg taken. The blue had charged without order, all formation broken, forced together in a narrow space, and they had rolled, a broken flood, back upon the dark bayou. As the rain had fallen in the night-time, so now fell the grey shot and shell, and they were beaten down like wheat beneath hail. The chill air was filled with whistling. The pall of the smoke added itself to the pall of the clouds. It was like fighting under a great and dingy tent with the stark cypress trees for tent poles. By the closing-down of day the desperately defeated had rolled back toward the Yazoo. Their dead and dying strewed the tent floor.