midday
Yet here was that theatre , and the Doctor 's metaphor was still good enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies , to whom Anna had quoted it . And here , sprinkled through the vast audience of that theatre , with as keen a greed for its play as any , were all the various non-combatants with whom we are here concerned , though not easily to be singled out , such mere units were they of the impassioned multitude every mere unit of which , to loved and loving ones , counted for more than we can tell . However , our favourites might be glimpsed now and then . On a certain midday of that awful half-week the Callenders , driving , took up Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to the newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surge of old men in fine dress , their precious dignity thrown to the dogs , each now but one of the common herd , and each against all , shouldering , sweating , and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and reader of the list , the long , ever-lengthening list of the killed and wounded . Much had been learned of the great two-days ' battle , and many an infantry sister , and many a battery sister besides Anna , was second-sighted enough to see , night and day , night and day , the muddy labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide , unbroken reaches of dense timber -- with their deep ravines , their long ridges , and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs -- in the day 's journey from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee . They saw them , not empty , nor fearlessly crossed by the quail , the wild turkey , the fox , or the unhunted deer , nor travelled alone by the homespun `` citizen '' or by scouts or foragers , but slowly overflowed by a great gray , silent , tangled , armed host -- cavalry , infantry , ordnance trains , batteries , battery wagons and ambulances : Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and their guns , and all the `` big generals '' and their smart escorts and busy staffs : Saw the various columns impeding each other , taking wrong ways and losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys , footsore , drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight , ate their five-days ' food in one , or threw it away to lighten the march , and toiled on in hunger , mud , cold and rain , without the note of a horn or drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming . They saw , did Anna and those sisters -LRB- and many and many a wife and mother from Callender House to Carrollton -RRB- , the vast , stealthy , fireless bivouac at fall of night , in ear-shot of the enemy 's tattoo , unsheltered from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves : Saw , just in the bivouac 's tortuous front , softly reddening the low wet sky , that huge , rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about Shiloh 's log meeting-house , where the victorious Grant 's ten-thousands -- from Ohio , Kentucky , Indiana , Illinois , Missouri , Iowa , Wisconsin , Michigan , as new to arms as their foe , yet a band of lions in lair -- lay dry-tented , full fed and fast asleep , safely flanked by swollen streams , their gunboats behind them and Buell coming , but without one mounted outpost , a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper of warning .