"We have four days' rations in our haversacks, and twelve days' in our wagons," said Colonel Batchelder, Quartermaster-in-chief of the Army of the Potomac.
Lee discovered the movement, and during the evening of the 29th made a diversion against the Ninth Corps. Precisely at ten o'clock there was a signal-gun, a yell, a volley of musketry as the Rebels attacked Parke's picket-line. Then came the roar of the cannonade. The Ninth Corps was prepared. Through the afternoon there had been suspicious movements along the Rebel lines, and Parke was on the watch. It was surmised that Lee would endeavor to compel Grant to recall the Fifth and Second Corps. Parke strengthened his picket-line, and brought up his reserve artillery, to be ready in case of emergency. In three minutes nearly two hundred guns and mortars were in play. The night was dark, the wind south, and rain falling, but the battle increased in intensity. I stood upon the hill in rear of the Ninth Corps, and witnessed the display. Thirty shells were in the air at the same instant. The horizon was bright with fiery arches, crossing each other at all angles, cut horizontally by streams of fire from rifled cannon. Beneath the arches thousands of muskets were flashing. It surpassed in sublimity anything I had witnessed during the war. The slightly wounded in the hospitals of the Ninth Corps who could walk went out with me to see the fight.
"I wish I was down there with the boys," said one who the day before had received a bullet through his right hand.
After two hours of terrific cannonade the uproar ceased, Lee having found that Grant's lines were as strong as ever. The demonstration cost him several hundred soldiers. I talked with one of the wounded Rebels.
"You can't subdue us even if you take Richmond," said he; "we'll fight it out in the mountains."
"Undoubtedly you feel like fighting it out, but you may think better of it one of these days."
A delegate of the Christian Commission sat down to write a letter for him to his wife, to be sent by a flag of truce.
"Tell her," said he, "that I am kindly treated."
His voice choked and tears rolled down his cheeks. A nurse stood over him bathing his wounds to cool the fever, combing his hair, and anticipating all his wants. I recalled the words of a citizen of Savannah, who said, "I went to the stockade when your prisoners were brought down from Millen, with a basket of oranges to give to the sick and dying, but was told by the officer in command that his orders were imperative to allow no one to give anything to the prisoners."
Observe the contrast. Here were good beds, nourishing food, delicacies from the stores of the Christian and Sanitary Commissions, and kind attention. There see a crowd of wretches in rags, exposed to the winds, the rains, the broiling heat or the biting cold, eating corn-meal and water, and meat alive with maggots,—stinted till starved, held captive till hope died, till the mind wandered, and the victims became drivelling imbeciles or walking skeletons, and greeted death as a welcome release from the horrors of their prison-pen. But I have adverted to this before; still commentary is ever provoked.