I remember so well these islands, when the guns and the gunners, the muskets and musketeers, struggled for place and foothold among the shifting sands. I remember the first swarthy regiments with their unsoldierly tread, and the soldierly bearing and noble brows of the patient philanthropists who volunteered to lead them. I can see again the scarlet flow of blood as it rolled over the black limbs beneath my hands and the great heave of the heart before it grew still. And I remember Wagner and its six hundred dead, and the great-souled martyr that lay there with them when the charge was ended and the guns were cold. Vividly she went on to describe the siege of Fort Wagner from Morris Island, thus: I saw the bayonets glisten. The “swamp angel” threw her bursting bombs, the fleet thundered its cannonade, and the dark line of blue trailed its way in the dark line of belching walls of Wagner. I saw them on, up, and over the parapets into the jaws of death, and heard the clang of the death-dealing sabers as they grappled with the foe. I saw the ambulances laden down with agony, and the wounded, slowly crawling to me down the tide-washed beach, Voris and Cumminger gasping in their blood. And I heard the deafening clatter of the hoofs of “Old Sam” as Elwell madly galloped up under the walls of the fort for orders. I heard the tender, wailing fife, the muffled drum and the last shots as the pitiful little graves grew thick in the shifting sands. Of this experience General Elwell afterward wrote: I was shot with an Enfield cartridge within one hundred and fifty yards of the fort and so disabled that I could not go forward. I was in an awful predicament, perfectly exposed to canister from Wagner and shell from Gregg and Sumter in front, and the enfilade from James Island. I tried to dig a trench in the sand with my saber, into which I might crawl, but the dry sand would fall back in place about as fast as I could scrape it out with my narrow implement. Failing in this, on all fours I crawled toward the lee of the beach, which was but a few yards off.... A charge of canister all around me aroused my reverie to thoughts of action. I abandoned the idea of taking the fort and ordered a retreat of myself, which I undertook to execute in a most unmartial manner on my hands and knees spread out like a turtle.