Looking across the Tennessee we see a body of cavalry, awaiting the transportation over. They are said to be Buell's advance, yet they have been there an hour or two alone. But suddenly there is a rustle among the runaways. It is! It is! You see the gleaming of the gun-barrels, you catch amid the leaves and undergrowth down the opposite side of the river, glimpses of the steady, swinging tramp of trained soldiers. A Division of Buell's army is here! And the men who have left their regiments on the field send up three cheers for Buell. They cheering! May it parch their throats, as if they had been breathing the simoon!
Here comes a boat across with a Lieutenant, and two or three privates of the signal corps. Some orders are instantly given the officer, and as instantly telegraphed to the other side by the mysterious wavings and raisings and droppings of the flags. A steamer comes up with pontoons on board, with which a bridge could be speedily thrown across. Unaccountably enough, to on-lookers, she slowly reconnoiters and steams back again. Perhaps, after all it is better to have no bridge there. It simplifies the question, takes escape out of the count, and leaves its victory or death--to the cowards, that slink behind the bluffs as well as to the brave men who peril their lives to do the State some service on the fields beyond. Preparations go rapidly forward for crossing the Division (General Nelson's, which has the advance of Buell's army) on the dozen or so transports that have been tied up along the bank.
We have spent but a few minutes on the bluff, but they are the golden minutes that count for years. Well was it for that driven, defeated, but not disgraced army of General Grant's that those minutes were improved. Colonel Webster, Chief of Staff, and an artillery officer of no mean ability, had arranged the guns that he could collect of those that remained to us in a sort of semi-circle, protecting the Landing, and bearing chiefly on our centre and left, by which the Rebels were pretty sure to advance. Corps of artillerists to man them were improvised from all the batteries that could be collected. Twenty-two guns in all were placed in position. Two of them were heavy siege-guns, long thirty-two. Where they came from I do not know; what battery they belonged to I have no idea; I only know that they were there, in the right place, half a mile back from the bluff, sweeping the approaches by the left, and by the ridge Corinth road; that there was nobody to work them; that Doctor Cornyn, Surgeon of Frank Blair's Old First Missouri Artillery, proffered his services, that they were gladly accepted, and that he did work them to such effect as to lay out ample work for scores of his professional brethren on the other side of the fight.