Is there any intoxication like the joy of victory? For the moment men forget everything else: fatigue, thirst, wounds, dead and suffering comrades, the parting shots of fleeing foe. But it is a short-lived joy; at least ours was, for the victory had been costly and there were sad gaps in the ranks of all the regiments as we reformed on the crest of the hills. Moreover, our work was but begun. The Sixth Corps had been ordered to join Hooker by cutting a road for itself through Lee's army. Regaining our knapsacks, we were speedily on the march, the First Division now in the advance, as ours, the Second, had been in the morning. Ghastly sights met us as we passed through the old town where the Light Division had charged; almost every house showed marks of shot or shell, and here and there on the sidewalks or at street corners, in the hot sunshine lay the dead bodies of poor heroes whose last battle was fought. I remember how almost always some comrade's friendly hand had pulled the corner of a blanket over their swollen and blackening faces. On we went leaving the town behind, marching along a well-made high-road into a country of small fields set in the midst of dense and scrubby pine woods and the afternoon was wearing away when suddenly, from the direction in which we were going, out of those mysterious thickets of pine came the Song. This time there was no prelude of cracking rifles and whispering bullets; but, as though some mighty hand smote at once all the bass notes of a great organ the cannonade roared out, swelling louder and louder all along our front. Soon we reached an open field where an ammunition train was parked and here we were halted to rest and replenish our cartridge boxes while the fierce roar of the Song still thundered until, as we were thus busied, there was a hush--one of those instant and ominous silences which smite the heart more loudly than any sound: the Song did not die away, it stopped. And then, after a breathless moment a new movement of the symphony began. Like the pattering roar of rain after thunder, or like the long roll from a hundred tenor drums it swept along and swelled out until the woods responsive seemed to vibrate to its rattle. It was the file-fire of the line of battle. We could see nothing, not even the smoke through the dense forest; we could only listen. "Hark!" said an old soldier standing near me. "D' ye hear that? Bullets this time: Them's the little things that kills!"