From one till after three o’clock, the historian is unable to follow the cloud of this battle. This period was what an elegant writer calls the _quid obscurum_ of battle. The war-cloud was broken up, and floated about in uncertainty. Victory, trembling in doubt, hovered over one party and then the other. Nobody can tell what was done. Tactics had become useless. Each individual soldier was his own commander. It was a wild sozzle--an enormous street _melee_. Batteries were charged and captured, and in a moment afterwards, re-captured. There was no base anywhere; everything was shifting. Volumes of smoke rolled up; cannon roared; muskets rattled; shouts and groans--all mingled together in one horrid bedlam of confusion. For two hours there was this irregular contest, in which men fought more as individuals than as companies. Three o’clock came. The fortunes of the Confederates were extremely dark. They had lost some of their best and bravest officers. Hampton was shot while leading on his men in desperation. The noble Bee, who had baptized Jackson with blood, fell mortally wounded at the head of the Alabamians in the thickest of the fray, grasping his sword and urging on his men with his dying breath. The magnanimous Barton, while rallying the seventh Georgia, was shot through the head, and as he fell, exclaimed: “They have killed me, but never give up the field,” and his pure, brave spirit winged its flight away from this awful scene of carnage, confusion and death. Fisher, of the “old North State,” was killed; Colonels Gartrell and Falkner were _hors de combat_. Many officers of lower grade, whose names will never be known, lay stretched upon the ground, never to rise again.