The army found the once magnificent cotton fields some of them having a thousand acres covered with corn, according to the order of Jeff Davis, while the fleecy crops of former harvests had been sent to a safer distance from the suspected course of General Sherman’s columns. At Ogeechee Church, on the river bearing that name, and the narrowest part of the peninsula between the streams, the army concentrated on the 5th and 6th of December. Meanwhile General Kilpatrick, when dashing toward Alexandria to burn the bridge over Brier Creek, encountered General Wheeler at Waynesboro’. The sabres gleam in the sunlight, and the bullets fly on their fatal mission, resulting at each conflict in the flight of the rebel general. The seventy-nine miles from Millen to Savannah steadily diminished, the splendid and triumphant army getting by the 8th within less than a score of miles from the goal of their martial and patriotic ambition. The heroic General Howard, at this crisis of affairs, executed a bold and brilliant movement. The rebels, to hold the Gulf Railroad, which they were using in earnest, had pushed across the Ogeechee. General Corse, of “Allatoona memory,” who, before they were aware of it, was between the Little and Great Ogeechee, thirteen miles in advance of the main army, reached and bridged the canal connecting the river with Savannah, then crossing it, intrenched himself securely, almost in sight of the city. And now the approach was hotly disputed, and brave men fell in the ranks of General Blair’s columns. But some were killed by the most cowardly and shameful conduct of the enemy. Shells and torpedoes had been buried in the way of the march, and the tread of the heroes exploding them, a number were prostrated in a sudden and horrible death. The precaution then taken was a just though severe one. Prisoners of war were ordered forward to remove the murderous and unseen means of destruction. The prisoners were sent in advance as ordered. Crawling, begging, praying, as their trembling fingers descended to dig away the earth about the death-traps which they had, perhaps, helped to set, they were a piteous spectacle. Soon the path was cleared for the onward steps of the Union boys. General Howard’s next daring deed was to communicate immediately with our fleet below Fort McAllister, held by a strong garrison of the enemy. Here, on the gunboat _Dandelion_, Admiral Dahlgren was anxiously waiting for tidings from the great army somewhere between Atlanta and the sea.