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The next morning, viz., February 17th, I rode to the head of General Howard's column, and found that during the night he had ferried Stone's brigade of Woods's division of the Fifteenth Corps across by rafts made of the pontoons, and that brigade was then deployed on the opposite bank to cover the construction of a pontoon-bridge nearly finished.
Although the familiar sounds of artillery boomed away quite close to them they were not deployed, and when it was dark they bivouacked along the side of the road. That night the Colonel addressed the Officers at some length. "The old man" always had an impressive way of speaking, and darkness and overwrought nerves doubtless magnified this.
The gray of dawn had turned into red, and a pale, clear light spread over all nature. I heard some sparrows, just awakened, twittering and conversing in a tall tree near me. They, too, wondered, doubtless, what it all meant, and talked it over in their own language. The troops deployed right and left, and soon the insurgent mass was closely surrounded in every direction and every outlet closed.
They blamed her for mud and dust, for shadeless, waterless stretches, for a habit she was acquiring of furrows and worn places, for the aid which she occasionally gave to hostile armies, for the hills which she presented, for the difficulties of her bordering stone walls when troops must be deployed, for the weeds and nettles, thistles, and briars, with which she had a trick of decking her sides, for her length.
Here the South Carolinians were for the first time thoroughly baptized with fire and blood, and in which the gallant Colonel James lost his life. Of this battle Colonel Rice says: "Late in the evening of September 14th the brigade reached the battlefield and deployed in an old disused road that crossed the mountain some four hundred yards to the right of the turn-pike. No enemy in sight.
The tactics of these columns consists in throwing out strong detachments of skirmishers. Gradually the supports are engaged and deployed. The line is broken, scattered, like a horde of irregular cavalry. The second line which has held close order tries to get up to the first promptly, first to engage in the fight, also because they suffer losses from the high shots directed at the first line.
Her gaze was on the glittering mass of men, horses, and brazen guns that came thundering across the plain in double column Irby at its head, Kincaid alone on the flank and sweeping right and left deployed into battery to the front with cannoneers springing to their posts for action.
Machine guns, long-range cannon, “dreadnoughts”, submarines, landmines, poison gas and the possibility of equipping airplanes for bombing attacks emerged as features of what one commentator has termed the “technology of death”. All of these instruments of annihilation would, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had warned, be deployed and refined during the course of the coming conflict.
Upon reaching this line, the Captain dismounted his battalion, leaving number four to hold horses, deployed as skirmishers and moved them directly through the infantry lines, through woods to fields and fields to woods until they gained the road above mentioned. This being done, the horses were ordered to be brought forward.
Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests.
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