We cannot chronicle all the battles and skirmishes of the “running fight”—not _from_ the enemy, but after him. The charge upon Allatoona Pass by the Union cavalry, June 2d, where General Sherman had flanked General Johnston a week before, was a brilliant display of valor baptized in blood.
The first week in June had passed, and General Sherman’s troops, after marching more than a hundred miles since leaving Chattanooga, through a country unknown to them, daily skirmishing with the watchful foe, striking against works capable of resisting twice their number of troops, and all the time without broken ranks, gaining substantial advantage, now fairly confronted General Johnston intrenched upon Lost Mountain, Pine Hill, and Kenesaw Mountain, three bold peaks connected together by a line of ridges, and twenty-six miles north of Atlanta. His line was closely circumscribed by ours. In no place were the hostile parallels more than a musket-shot apart. The rebel right rested on Kenesaw Mountain, on the railroad, four miles north of Marietta, their left on Lost Mountain, some six miles west of Kenesaw. Between these two formidable ridges the rebels had gradually been forced back from a triangle, with the apex toward us, until their line was but a faint crescent, their centre still being slightly advanced. Right, left, and centre, their position was closely invested. Our troops shed parallel after parallel, until the country in their rear was furrowed with rifle-pits and abatis, and scored with a labyrinth of roads.
“The country is covered with primitive forests, and in very few places are there cleared spaces sufficiently large to display the movements of a brigade. There is an abundance of scrubby undergrowth which hides every thing a few yards distant from view; and when one inspects the difficulties, it seems hardly credible, though such is the case, that we fully developed the enemy’s position with two days’ skirmish.”
A brave officer from whose accurate observations passages have already been taken, says of this halting-place in the great race for Atlanta: “The ridge in front of Kenesaw commences about Wallace’s House on the Burnt Hickory and Marietta road, and extends thence across the railroad behind Noonday Creek about two miles in an east-by-north direction. Lost Mountain and Kenesaw are about eleven hundred feet high, Pine Hill and Brushy Hill about four hundred feet high, and the ridges everywhere about one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, or about the same as, and, in fact, not very dissimilar to Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga. The enemy was everywhere strongly intrenched behind log barricades, protected by earth thrown against them, with a ditch, formidable abatis, and in many places a chevaux-de-frise of sharpened fence-rails besides. Their intrenchments were well protected by thick traverses, and at frequent intervals arranged with emplacements and embrasures for field-guns. The thickness of this parapet was generally six to eight feet _at top_ on the infantry line, and from twelve to fifteen feet thick at the top, where field-guns were posted or where fire from our artillery was anticipated. The amount of digging and intrenching that Johnston’s army had done is almost incredible. General Sherman’s tactics resulted in wresting Lost Mountain, Pine Hill, the ridge in front of Kenesaw, and Brushy Hill from the enemy, and forcing back his two wings, Kenesaw Mountain operating as a sort of hinge, until his left was behind Olley’s Creek, and his right behind the stream which flows between the houses named on the map as McAffee and Wiley Roberts. Kenesaw Mountain then became the projecting fortress of the defensive line, the wings being turned backward from it. It is a rocky eminence, rather precipitous, thickly-wooded, and crowned with batteries.