It was no longer possible for officers to check individual cases of fear. Their whole attention was taken up in keeping the bulk of their men in line and in keeping them advancing. The dead strewed the stubble ground in windrows. The fire-streaked smoke rolled out in a blinding, acrid wave from the nearing fringe of trees. And at every yard of distance gained the Confederate volleys waxed more and more accurate, the piles of dead higher and thicker. Unscathed, the wood’s defenders were killing by wholesale. And a corps commander’s folly was paid for in the lives of hundreds of better, wiser, braver men than himself. A riderless horse, his back broken by a grapeshot, crawled along the space between the Federals and the wood, dragging his hind legs behind him and screaming hideously above the near-by din. A major, sword in hand, running ten yards in advance of his regiment and hallooing to them to come on, stopped abruptly, his brown face turning suddenly to a mask of blood, and fell where he stood. He was major in Dad’s regiment. And Dad himself, as the men wavered on seeing their loved officer fall, leaped forward, sword aloft, to take the dead man’s place ahead of the line. His lean body tense, his mild eyes aflame, the sword of old Ehud Sessions whirling in wild encouragement above his bared head, Captain James Dadd charged onward, yelling to his men to follow. And not only his own company, but the whole regiment, obeyed that call. For another fifty yards the Federal line--now irregular as a snake-fence--plunged forward; Dad’s regiment, the Blankth Ohio Infantry, forming its foremost point. But flesh and blood could not stand the increasingly galling fire from the forest. Mortal nerves were not proof against the horrible strain of advancing to be struck down by the invisible, with no chance to strike a single return blow. To have halted, if only once, and to have fired a chance volley, even ineffective, or its effect unseen, into the trees and underbrush whence poured that hail of death, would have been infinite relief. But the officers had had their orders from the chattering corps commander. And those orders were to advance at the double and to continue to advance until the Federal line should come to grips with the foe. Despite the frenzied exertions of their officers, the men began to lag. The trot slacked to a walk. The walk to an almost general and very wavering halt. Dad, hoarse and exhausted, knew that the next move would be a cave-in of the demoralized line, then a retreat that would change to panic flight and a universal hurling away of rifles and knapsacks. Moreover, that soldiers who once allowed themselves to flee in that fashion would never again be the same men. Their usefulness in war would be impaired by full fifty per cent., even as a horse that once has run away is no longer to be trusted.