On the twenty-sixth the mortars upon the Louisiana side began again to throw huge shells into the town, while the gunboats opened a rapid and heavy firing upon the lower batteries. This continued. On the twenty-eighth the grey exploded a mine before the lunette on the Baldwin’s Ferry road, where the Federal sap was within six yards of the ditch. At point after point now, the blue line held that near the grey. At places the respective parapets were fearfully close. There was fighting with hand grenades, there was tossing of fire-balls against the sap rollers behind which worked the blue miners.
Night attacks grew frequent; all the weakened grey soldiers lay on their arms; no one, day or night, could leave the trenches. The wounded, the fevered, the hunger-weakened, the sleepless—Vicksburg’s defenders grew half wraith, half scarecrow.
In the dead night of the twenty-ninth, after five hours of a sultry and sullen stillness, every blue cannon appeared to open. From the Louisiana shore, from the river, from the land, north, east, and south, came the blast.
Désirée parted the mat of ivy and watched with Edward from the mouth of the cave.
“The twenty-ninth!” he said. “It is, I think, the beginning of the end. I doubt if we can hold out another week.”
She sat on the earth beside him, her head against the pillow. Lip and ear must be near together; at any distance the blast carried the voice away. “The beginning of the end.... You think General Johnston will not come?”
“How can he? I saw the force that he had. It is not possible. He is right in refusing to play the dare-devil or to sacrifice for naught. He should have been listened to in the beginning.”
“And we cannot cut our way out?”
“Evacuate? How many could march ten miles? No. Troy’s down—Troy’s down!”
“Richmond is Troy.”