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Along the strips of road were winding clumsy baggage-trains; the regiment of dragoons was trailing in advance; the gleam of the musket-barrels of the infantry was visible on all sides; and every puff of the breeze that blew over the bluff was freighted with the rumble of artillery-carriages and caissons.
He heard the shouts of the outriders, the crack of the stout whips, the rattle of the caissons, and, before it passed, he had caught the excited gestures of the men upon the guns. The battery unlimbered, as he watched it, shot a few rounds from the summit of the hill, and retreated rapidly to a new position.
All I could perceive, however, was a disabled gun, a broken mitrailleuse, and two badly damaged caissons. Everything else, except a little ammunition in the trenches, had been carried away, and it was plain to see, from the good shape in which the French left wing had retired to Metz, that its retreat had been predetermined by the disasters to the right wing.
One curious detail connected with the bridge is that the Milwaukee, one of the double-turreted gunboats which Eads had built from his own plans, and which had been with Farragut at Mobile, was bought now from a wrecking company, and her iron hull used in making the caissons; so that her usefulness still continued in peace as in war.
Some kind of order, prompt and immediate, must be forced out of this chaos; and it came, for the master-spirit was there to arrange and compel. He mounted several hundred men, giving them rifles instead of sabres. He manned new guns, procuring harness and ammunition for them from Louisville. Where there were no caissons, he supplied wagons.
Colonel Cornyn, hearing firing in the rear, immediately fell back, and with the First Alabama Cavalry charged the rebels and retook the artillery and caissons, with the exception of one gun, which the enemy succeeded in getting off with. The charge of the Alabamians with muskets only, and those not loaded, is creditable, especially as they are all new recruits and poorly drilled.
At the battle of Fere Champenoise the Allies captured a convoy consisting of nearly all the remaining ammunition and stores of the army, a vast quantity of arms, caissons, and equipage of all kinds. The whole became the prey of the Allies, who published a bulletin announcing this important capture.
Then there was shouting on the road; the stragglers fled left and right, a waggon of swearing women turned over into a great ditch, and with laughter, curses, and crack of whip, two well-horsed cannon and caissons bounded over the field, crashing through a remnant of snake fence, and so down the road at speed. I ran behind them, glad of the gap they left.
Louis, is supported by towers the foundations of which are sunk 107 feet below the ordinary level of the water; at this depth the men working in the caissons were subjected to a pressure of nearly fifty pounds to the square inch, almost equal to that used to run some steam-engines.
Six of these guns I turned over with caissons complete; eleven were hauled off the field and appropriated by an officer of high rank General Hazen. I have no disposition to renew the controversy which grew out of this matter.
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