Soon in the cloudy sky the cannonade rolled about in broad day, which was still so gray that long wide flashes of flame could be seen to spring far out before every report from the guns of Fort Hell, and in the haze but few of the rebel shells shrieking along their high curve could be clearly seen bursting over Hancock’s cheering men. Indistinguishably blent were the sounds of hosts on the move, field-guns pounding to the front, troops shouting, the clink and rattle of metal, officers calling, bugles blaring, drums rolling, mules screaming,—all heard as a running accompaniment to the cannon heavily punctuating the multitudinous din.
"Fwat sinse in the ould man bodderin’ us?" grumbled Corporal Kennedy, a tall Fenian dragoon from the British army. "Sure, ain’t it as plain as the sun—and faith the same’s not plain this dirthy mornin’—that there’s no work for cavalry the day, barrin’ it’s escortin’ the doughboys’ prisoners, if they take any?—bad ’cess to the job. Sure it’s an infantry fight, and must be, wid the field-guns helpin’, and the siege pieces boomin’ away over the throops in the mud betwigst our own breastworks and the inner line of our forts."
"Oh, by this and by that," the corporal grumbled on, "ould Lee’s not the gintleman I tuk him for at all, at all,—discomfortin’ us in the rain,—and yesterday an illigant day for fightin’. Couldn’t he wait, like the dacint ould boy he’s reported, for a dhry mornin’, instead av turnin’ his byes out in the shlush and destroyin’ me chanst av breakfast? It’s spring chickens I’d ordhered."
"You may get up to spring-chicken country soon, now," said Bader. "I’m thinking this is near the end; it’s the last assault that Lee will ever deliver."
"Faith, I dunno," said the corporal; "that’s what we’ve been saying sinst last fall, but the shtay of them Johnnies bates Banagher and the prophets. Hoo—ow! by the powers! did you hear them yell? Fwat? The saints be wid us! who’d ’a’ thought it possible? Byes! Bader! Harry! luk at the Johnnies swarmin’ up the face of Hell!"
Off there Harry could dimly see, rising over the near horizon made by tents, a straggling rush of men up the steep slope, while the rebel yell came shrill from a multitude behind on the level ground that was hidden from the place occupied by the cavalry regiment. In the next moment the force mounting Fort Hell’s slope fell away, some lying where shot down, some rolling, some running and stumbling in heaps; then a tremendous musketry and field-gun fire growled to and fro under the heavy smoke round and about and out in front of the embrasures, which had never ceased their regular discharge over the heads of the fort’s defenders and immediate assailants.