The first wild cries from the pickets rushing in, and the few scattering shots that preceded their arrival, aroused the regiments to a sense of their peril; an instant afterward shells were hurling through the tents, while, before there was time for thought of preparation, there came rushing through the woods with lines of battle sweeping the whole fronts of the division-camps, and bending down on either flank, the fine, dashing, compact columns of the enemy.
Into the just-aroused camps thronged the Rebel regiments, firing sharp volleys as they came, and springing toward our laggards with the bayonet. Some were shot down as they were running, without weapons, hatless, coatless, toward the river. The searching bullets found other poor unfortunates in their tents, and there, all unheeding now, they still slumbered, while the unseen foe rushed on. Others fell, as they were disentangling themselves from the flaps that formed the doors to their tents; others as they were buckling on their accoutrements; a few, it was even said, as they were vainly trying to impress on the cruelly exultant enemy their readiness to surrender.
Officers were wounded in their beds, and left for dead, who, through the whole two days' fearful struggle, lay there gasping in their agony, and on Monday evening were found in their gore, inside their tents, and still able to tell the tale.
Such were the fearful disasters that opened the Rebel onset on the lines of Prentiss's Division. Similar were the fates of Hildebrand's Brigade in Sherman's Division.
Meantime, what they could our shattered regiments did. Falling rapidly back through the heavy woods till they gained a protecting ridge, firing as they ran, and making what resistance men thus situated might, Sherman's men succeeded in partially checking the rush of the enemy, long enough to form their hasty line of battle. Meantime the other two brigades of the division (to the right) sprang hastily to their arms, and had barely done so when the enemy's lines came sweeping up against their fronts too, and the battle thus opened fiercely along Sherman's whole line on the right.
Hildebrand's Brigade had been compelled to abandon their camps without a struggle. Some of the regiments, it is even said, ran without firing a gun. Colonel Appler's Fifty-third Ohio, is loudly complained of on this score, and others are mentioned. It is certain that parts of regiments, both here and in other divisions, ran disgracefully. Yet they were not wholly without excuse. They were raw troops, just from the usual idleness of our "camps of instruction;" hundreds of them had never heard a gun fired in anger; their officers, for the most part, were equally inexperienced; they had been reposing in fancied security, and were awakened, perhaps from sweet dreams of home and wives and children, by the stunning roar of cannon in their very midst, and the bursting of bomb-shells among their tents--to see only the serried columns of the magnificent Rebel advance, and through the blinding, stifling smoke, the hasty retreat of comrades and supports, right and left. Certainly, it is sad enough, but hardly surprising, that under such circumstances, some should run. Half as much caused the wild panic at Bull Run, for which the nation, as one man, became a loud-mouthed apologist.