The gray of the dawning day was here. Bugles were sounding. Confusion, noise, action was on all sides. The camp had been surprised! The enemy was upon them! Grape, canister and Enfield balls tore through the tents. Shells burst; the first vision that met his eyes as he rushed forth, was a horse of one of their own batteries, struggling, moaning, whinnying pitifully with both fore-legs torn away, and the cannon half overturned. An onrushing force of Confederates shouting in triumph. As his own regiment tried to form in line, three terrified horses tore past dragging their fellow, and what was left of the dismantled cannon. They were wounding each other cruelly in their mad frenzy of pain and fright. They fell in one mass of struggling, suffering, panic-stricken flesh into the river and drowned, with their harness binding them together, and to the wreck of their dismantled burden. Everything was confusion. Each regiment was doing its best to form and repulse the terrible onslaught. The surprise had been complete. The scouts had been surrounded and captured, and the pickets killed or driven in at the first charge which had awakened the sleeping camp. The horrors, the disasters and the triumphs of Shiloh had begun!
There was no time to think. Action, alone, was possible--the intuitive action of the soldier. The men formed as best they could, and fought as they fell back, or as they advanced a step, with dogged determination to retrieve lost ground. Some were driven into the river, and when wounded, fell beneath its waves to rise no more. The intrepid Confederates followed up their first dash with persistent determination, in spite of the forced march which had preceded the surprise, and in spite of hunger and uncertainty when their supplies might come. They aimed at nothing short of capture. Then supplies would be theirs without delay. But every foot of ground was being stubbornly contested. Now a gain was made, now a loss. Both sides were fighting with that desperation which makes certain only one thing as the issue of the battle--the certainty of an awful carnage. At Such a time it does not seem possible, and yet it is true, that a sense of reckless humor finds place and material to feed its fancy. A good-natured badinage held possession of many of the men.