They went back slowly, but they went back.

Dick felt as if the whole weight were pressing upon his own chest, and when he tried to shout no words would come.
Back they went, inch by inch, leaving the ground covered with their dead.

Dick was conscious only of a vast roar and shouting and the continuous blaze of cannon and rifles in his very face.

But he understood the immensity of the crisis.

By a huge victory in the West the Confederacy would redress the loss of Gettysburg in the East.