The rebel artillery was skilfully managed, and their range proved to be excellent; while the management and effect of the Union guns can only be described by one word--magnificent. The superior weight and management of the Federal metal was manifest from one fact if no other--the continual limbering up and changing positions of the rebel pieces, to escape the deadly aim of artillerymen who have probably never been excelled in any service. The only historian who has as yet dealt with the events of that great day,[14] says that it was "madness for the Confederates to rush against such obstacles," and that during the entire day, owing to the weight and superior management of the Federal artillery, they fought "without for a single moment having a chance of success." And yet this was the artillery of an army, and this was the army itself, spoken of by detractors as "defeated" and "demoralized," and utterly incapable of further offensive movements against Richmond, however rested and reinforced!
Under cover of the smoke of this fire, the mighty hosts of Huger, Jackson and Magruder advanced to the second general assault. Onward they rushed, and, emerging from the sulphurous clouds, rolled forward in heavy columns. They presented a still more imposing front than at the first attack, stretching more than half a mile across the fatal Carter's Field, with scarce a break or an interval in its entire length. On they pressed--steadily, resolutely, desperately--pausing an instant to pour in their fire, and then forward again at quick step. The advance was met with belching volumes from rifles, muskets and batteries, sending such storms of "leaden rain and iron hail" as no body of men on earth could hope to withstand, and joining with the shrieks and shouts of the combatants and the dying, to create such a din as might well have given the impression that the chains of Pandemonium were unloosed and all the lost replying to the thunders of heaven with screams of blasphemy and desperation.
At this moment, too, a new element of terror and destruction broke suddenly into the conflict. As if the powers of the air had indeed begun to take part in the struggle, fiery meteors fell out of the air, from a direction not commanded by the Federal batteries--fiery meteors before which whole ranks of men seemed like stubble before the scythe. One of them would fall hissing through the air, burst with a horrible explosion, and the moment after nothing would remain of the ranks of rebels within thirty or forty feet of it, but a mass of shattered and mangled fragments, limbs torn from limbs and heads from bodies. At first the rebels could not understand the meaning of this new and awful visitation, and even the Union troops were not for the time aware what new power had come to their aid, destroying more of the enemy at a blow than their heaviest and best-served batteries. But the signal officer on the gable of the old mansion on Malvern Hill saw, and soon communicated the fact to the officers in command--that the gun-boats Galena and Aroostook (not the Monitor, as has been sometimes reported), had steamed up from their anchorage at Curl's Neck, two miles below, and opened furious broadsides of shell from their heavy rifled guns. These shells were the terrible missiles working that untold destruction in the rebel ranks; and the horrors and dangers of the fight to them must have been intensely aggravated by these fiery monsters that came tearing and shrieking through the forest and exploded with concussions that shook the earth like discharges from whole batteries. Only after the battle was over could the ravages made by this agency be fully appreciated, from the effects produced on natural objects lying in the line of their course. In many places, avenues rods long and many feet in width, were cut through the tree-tops and branches; and in not a few instances, great trees, three and four feet in diameter, were burst open from branch to root, split to shreds and scattered in splinters in all directions.