covered with at least five feet thickness of earth, while an interior ditch say three feet in depth gave complete protection to the garrison from volleys of musketry, or discharges of grape and canister shot. Inside, the battery presented a most revolting appearance. Beneath the parapet, in the ditch, on the open ground under the gun-carriages, lay the dead and mangled bodies of rebels. On every side lay heaped the bleeding carcasses of artillery horses, killed by musket or rifle balls. Here and there a broken gun-carriage, or caisson, lay tilted into the mud. Stores of all kinds were scattered over the ground or trampled in the black mire. Muskets with broken stocks or bent barrels were thrown about in every direction. It was a scene of wild confusion on all sides. It was not known with certainty that there was no other battery erected formidable as this still further up the road; but thinking it best to increase the panic which had seized upon the enemy, General Burnside ordered an advance. General Foster immediately sent forward the Twenty-fourth, Twenty-fifth, Twenty-seventh, and the whole brigade by the straight road. In the charge on the rifle-pit about one hundred rebels, among them the Colonel of the Thirty-third North Carolina and a number of commissioned officers, were captured. When these were secured in an old brick-kiln and placed under guard, Generals Reno and Parke moved their brigades after General Foster’s, the former going before up the railroad track and the latter by the country road. The march to Newbern was unobstructed, the enemy having apparently all he could do to get away on any terms, and early in the afternoon the Union forces reached the bank of the river immediately opposite the city. Long before they came in sight of it, however, dense volumes of smoke were seen rising in that direction, and the suspicion that the place had been fired by the enemy was fully realized when its steeples and houses came in view. Newbern had been fired in seven different places, and if the wind had not mercifully subsided there would hardly have been a house left standing by nightfall. The splendid railroad bridge, seven hundred yards long, had been set on fire by a scow load of turpentine which had drifted against it, and the great structure was wrapped in one grand sheet of flame. Preparations were made by General Foster to move his forces across the river. This was accomplished by the assistance of a light draft stern-wheel steamer which had been captured with four or five small side-wheel boats by the naval gunboats, which by this time were quite up to the city wharves. To the eastward of the city a very large rebel camp, with barracks and tents, was found deserted and taken possession of. Stragglers from different regiments wandered through the city and committed some acts of depredation; but were speedily checked by a strong Provost-Guard appointed by the commanding General.