Stealthily the troops crept to their new positions and lay down in line of battle on their arms. All through the night Buell's men were marching up from Savannah to the point opposite Pittsburgh Landing and being ferried across, or were coming up on transports. By an hour after dark Lew. Wallace had his division in. Through the misdirection he had received from General Grant at noon, he had started on the Snake Creek road proper, which would have brought him in on the enemy's rear, miles from support, and where he would have been gobbled at a mouthful. Getting back to the right road had delayed him. He at once ascertained the position of certain Rebel batteries which lay in front of him on our right, that threatened absolutely to bar his advance in the morning, and selected positions for a couple of his batteries, from which they could silence the one he dreaded. Placing these in position, and arranging his brigades for support, took him till one o'clock in the morning. Then his wearied men lay down to snatch a few hours of sleep before entering into the Valley of the Shadow of Death on the morrow.
By nine o'clock all was hushed near the Landing. The host of combatants that three hours before had been deep in the work of human destruction had all sunk silently to the earth, "the wearied to sleep, the wounded to die." The stars looked out upon the scene, and all breathed the natural quiet and calm of a Sabbath evening. But presently there came a flash that spread like sheet lightning over the ripples of the river-current, and the roar of a heavy naval gun went echoing up and down the bluffs, through the unnatural stillness of the night. Others speedily followed. By the flash you could just discern the black outline of the piratical-looking hull, and see how the gunboat gracefully settled into the water at the recoil: the smoke soon cast up a thin veil that seemed only to soften and sweeten the scene, from the woods away inland you caught faintly the muffled explosion of the shell, like the knell of the spirit that was taking its flight.
We knew nothing then of the effect of this gunboat cannonading, which was vigorously kept up till nearly morning, and it only served to remind us the more vividly of the day's disasters, of the fact that half a mile off lay a victorious enemy, commanded by the most dashing of their generals, and of the question one scarcely dared ask himself: "What to-morrow?" We were defeated, our dead and dying were around us, days could hardly sum up our losses. And then there came up that grand refrain of Whittier's--written after Manassas, I believe, but on that night, apparently far more applicable to this greater than Manassas--"Under the Cloud and Through the Sea."