The regiment shifted a little to the right, where a great column was forming for a direct attack upon the Confederate lines. Twenty thousand men stood in a vast line and forty thousand were behind them to march in support.
Dick had thought that he would be insensible to emotions, but his heart began to throb again. The spectacle thrilled and awed him—the great army marching to the attack and the resolute army awaiting it. Soon he heard behind him the firing of the artillery which sent shot and shell over their heads at the enemy. A dozen cannon came into action, then twenty, fifty, a hundred and more, and the earth trembled with the mighty concussion.
Dick felt the surge of triumph. They had yet met no answering fire. Perhaps General Pope and not Colonel Winchester had been right after all, and the Confederates were crushed. Awaiting them was only a rear guard which would flee at the first flash of the bayonets in the wood.
The great line marched steadily onward, and the cannon thundered and roared over the heads of the men raking the wood with steel. Still no reply. Surely the sixty thousand Union men would now march over everything. They were driving in the swarms of skirmishers. Dick could see them retreating everywhere, in the wood over the hills and along an embankment.
Warner was on his right and Pennington on his left. Dick glanced at them and he saw the belief in speedy victory expressed on the faces of both. It seemed to him, too, that nothing could now stop the massive columns that Pope was sending forward against the thinned ranks of the Confederates.
They were much nearer and he saw gray lines along an embankment and in a wood. Then above the crash and thunder of their covering artillery he heard another sound. It was the Southern bugles calling with a piercing note to their own men just as the Northern trumpets had called.
Dick saw a great gray multitude suddenly pour forward. It looked to him in the blur and the smoke like an avalanche, and in truth it was a human avalanche, a far greater force of the South than they expected to meet there. Directly in front of the Union column stood the Stonewall Brigade, and all the chosen veterans of Stonewall Jackson's army.
“It's a fight, face to face,” Dick heard Colonel Winchester say.
Then he saw a Union officer, whose name he did not know suddenly gallop out in front of the division, wave his saber over his head and shout the charge. A tremendous rolling cry came from the blue ranks and Dick physically felt the whole division leap forward and rush at the enemy.
Dick saw the officer who had made himself the leader of the charge gallop straight at a breastwork that the Southerners had built, reach and stand, horse and rider, a moment at the top, then both fall in a limp heap. The next instant the officer, not dead but wounded, was dragged a prisoner behind the embankment by generous foes who had refused to shoot at him until compelled to do so.