“Cleburne’s men are away off there at Chickamauga Creek—”
“Most of the enemy’s tents are gone,” said the captain, “and they have removed their pontoon bridges. When this fog lifts—”
Walthall came by, talking to his adjutant. “As far as you can tell for the fog they are moving rapidly on the left. General Stevenson showed me an order from General Bragg. Stevenson has the whole defence on this side of Chattanooga Creek.”
“Do you think they will attack to-day?”
“Who can tell? If this miserable fog would lift—”
Crack! crack! crack! crack! out of the woods to the westward rang the muskets of the picket line. Instantaneously, from the batteries on Moccasin Point, from the batteries on the ridge over the creek, sprang a leap of light that tore the fog. Followed thunder, and the ploughing of shells into the earth of Lookout. The grey brigade sprang to arms. In tumbled the pickets. “Yankees above us—”
“Above—!”
The Lookout cliffs were tall and grey. They crowned the mountain with an effect from below of robber castles. The November woods were so sere and leafless that in clear weather, looking up the long slopes, you would see with distinctness wall and bastion. Today there was fog, fog torn by the crowding yellow flashes of many rifles. The flashes came from the base of the cliffs. They came from blue troops, troops that had crept from the west, around the shoulder of Lookout, along the base of the cliffs—troops that were many, troops of Hooker’s that had come up from the valley of Lookout Creek, stealing up the mountain in silence and security, in the heavy fog. Now they hurrahed and sprang down from among the cliffs. Many and ready, they dropped as from the clouds; they took the grey brigade in reverse. And with instantaneous thunder the batteries opened all along the front.
The blue—Geary’s division—came over the shoulder of the mountain in three lines. From time to time in the past weeks the grey had constructed rude works of stones and felled wood. Now the men fought from one to another of these; withdrawn from one base to a second, from a second to a third, they fought from facet to facet of Lookout. The ground was intolerably rough, with boulder and fallen timber and snares of leafless vines. Now the grey were upon a slope where the casemented batteries of Moccasin Point had full play. There was an old rifle-pit dug downward and across. It gave the men passing over this shoulder a certain vague and ineffective shelter. Walthall’s men, forced from Lookout, came to Craven’s house, and here, in hollow ground, made a stand and sent for reinforcements. Pettus’s brigade appearing at last, the fight was renewed. It waged hotly for a while, but the odds were great. The November day spread its mists around. Mississippi and Alabama fought well on Lookout; but there was somehow a sinking at the heart, a dreary knowledge that Grant had perhaps a hundred thousand men and the Army of Tennessee a third of that number; that General Bragg was a good man, but not a soldier like Lee or Jackson or Johnston; that Longstreet should never have been detached; that there was a coldness in this thickening fog; that the guns on Moccasin Point were as venomous as its name; and that War was a nightmare oftener than one would think. Two months had passed since Chickamauga. That was a great battle, that was a great, glorious, terrible, hot-blooded, crashing battle, with the woods ringing and the blue breaking before you! This was not that. Two months of sickness, two months of hard picketing, two months of small rations and difficult to get, two months of dissatisfaction with the commanding general and his plan of campaign, of constant criticism, of soreness, of alternation between the fractious and the listless, two months of fretting and waiting in an unhealthy season, in an unhealthy situation,—the Army of Tennessee was in a conceiving mood that differed palpably from the mood of Chickamauga! It was ready for bogies, ready for—what? It did not know. At dusk the command that had been posted on Lookout, pressed backward and down throughout the foggy day, halted at the foot of the mountain, on the road leading outward and across a half-mile of valley to Missionary Ridge. Here in darkness and discontent it waited until midnight, when, under orders from Cheatham, it sank farther down to McFarland’s Spring. At dawn it was marched across the lowland to Missionary Ridge, and was put into position on that solemn wave of earth. It found here the other commands forming the Confederate centre.
Patrick Cleburne, ordered with his division after Longstreet on the Knoxville expedition, received at Chickamauga Station a telegram from the general commanding. “We are heavily engaged. Move up rapidly to these headquarters.”