Vassar heard one of them coming toward the crest of the hill that was red with heroic blood. It came through the air with the uncanny roar of an express train. The sound rose until the heavens quivered with the howl of a cyclone.
And then came the crash squarely in the center of our trenches! An explosion followed that rocked the earth and sent a great billowing cloud of smoke and dust high over the treetops into the skies. Fragments of the débris were hurled half a mile in every direction. No living thing was left to tell the story within a hundred yards of the spot. A breach had been made in the trenches through which a regiment might have charged as over an open field. For eighteen hours this terrific hail of huge projectiles continued without pause. The dull thunder was incessant and its vibration shook the world in tremors as from an earthquake.
With grim persistence our men still clung to what was left of their trenches until the night of the second day.
Hood sullenly ordered the retreat to his last line of entrenchments resting on Babylon. The discovery of the movement lead to a fierce rear guard action with the pursuing cavalry of the enemy. Their great field searchlights now swept the heavens and flooded every open space with deadly glare.
The attacking cavalry fell into ambush carefully prepared and were annihilated. They didn’t repeat the attack. But our guns had no sooner limbered up and withdrawn from their position when a squadron of the new steel cavalry, guided by the searchlights, charged at full speed seventy miles an hour down the turnpike straight into our retreating infantry. An armored automobile, spitting a storm of lead from its machine guns, plunged headlong into a regiment of volunteers, worn and half-starved and ready to fall for the lack of sleep. The huge wheels rolled over prostrate men like a great juggernaut, hurling others into the fields and dashing them among the limbs of trees.
The monster stopped at last choked by the mangled bodies caught in its machinery. A hundred desperate men swarmed over its sides and in a fierce hand to hand fight captured the car and killed its crew.
Again and again through the night of this terrible retreat these tactics were repeated. Not one of the six machines that charged our lines ever returned to tell the story. Not one that charged failed to pile the dead in heaps along the white shining turnpike.
The Holland house was inside the third line. Vassar hurried forward to beg Virginia to return with the girls and the older people to New York.
They refused to stir.
“What’s the use, sir?” Holland snapped. “We’re as safe here as anywhere. If Hood can’t hold this railroad junction—it’s all over. The wildest reports come in hourly from New York. The looting and outrages surpass belief—”