But bullets were by no means the only source of trouble and danger. Several times during the long struggle, the woods caught fire, literally suffocating men by hundreds who had passed safely through hail-storms of bullets and successfully met and repelled charges with the bayonet. Earthworks hastily thrown up with pine-log revetments for their support, after enabling the men behind them to resist and repel successive assaults of desperate adversaries, became themselves an irresistible foe, by the firing of their log fronts and the consequent emanation of a smoke too stifling for human lungs to breathe and yet retain capacity for further breathing. The artillery played a comparatively small and very difficult part in all this. Manœuvring with guns in that underbrush was well-nigh impossible, and there were no vantage grounds anywhere from which a gun could deliver its fire at more than pistol-shot range. So delivering it, either the cannon fire quickly drove the enemy away, or the fire of the enemy drove the gun away; and in neither case, after that, could the artillery-men see any enemy to shoot at. Nevertheless, Marshall Pollard’s battery managed to expend the greater part of its ammunition during those days, and that with effect. Kilgariff was largely instrumental in this. Early in the contest Pollard had clearly seen the difficulty—nay, the impossibility—of handling a battery of six guns as a unit in such conditions. He was subject to orders, of course, but in the execution of his orders he had a certain necessary discretion, and he exercised it. He had only two lieutenants present for duty. Each of these, of course, had immediate command of a section of two guns. The third section fell to Sergeant-major Kilgariff, as next in command. So to him Marshall Pollard said:— “I cannot have you personally with me in this fight. You have a lieutenant’s duty to do, and I trust you to do it well. I shall try to keep the battery together, and under my own command so far as I can; but I foresee that it is going to be impossible to do that completely. I must leave each section commander to his own discretion, in a very large degree. Frankly, I have much greater confidence in your ability to fight your guns for all they are worth than I have in that of either of the lieutenants. They are good men and true, but they have had no experience in independent command. You—well, anyhow, you know more than they do So I am glad that you have the left section. That, of course, must be the first to be detached. The others I shall try to keep under my own direction.”