The first men in line were in to their knees and stuck fast before they could stop the lines surging on in the dark. They collide with the bogged ones and fall over them. The ranks behind stumble in on top of the fallen before word can be passed to halt.
The night reeks with oaths. The patient heavens reverberate with them. The mud-soaked soldiers damned with equal unction all things visible and invisible on the earth, under it and above it. They cursed the United States of America and they damned the Confederate States with equal emphasis and wished them both at the bottom of the lowest depths of the deepest pit of perdition.
As one fellow blew the mud from his mouth and nose he bawled:
"I wish Sherman and Hood were both in hell this minute!"
"Yes, and fightin' it out to suit themselves!" his comrade answered.
On through the black night the long blue lines crept under lowering skies toward their foe, the stern face of William Tecumseh Sherman grimly set on his desperate purpose.
[CHAPTER XXXIX]
[VICTORY]
Betty had found the President at the War Telegraph office in the old Army and Navy building. He was seated at the desk by the window where in 1862 he had written his first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation on pieces of pasteboard.