As they were forming, the camps of the 8th Lancers and the 10th Light Battery rang with bugle music.

Berkley, standing to horse, saw the Zouaves leaving the hill at a jog-trot, their red legs twinkling; but half way down the slope they were halted to dress ranks; and the Lancers, cantering ahead, turned westward and moved off along the edge of the river swamp toward the piled-up cloud of smoke down stream.
After them trotted the 10th New York Flying Battery as though on parade, their guidons standing straight out behind the red-and-white guidons of the Lancers.
The Zouaves had now reached wet land, where a staff officer met Colonel Craig and piloted him through a field of brush and wild grass, and under the parapets of an emplacement for big guns, on which men were nonchalantly working, to the beginning of a newly laid road of logs.

The noise of musketry and the smoke had become prodigious.

On the logs of the road lay the first big pool of blood that many of them had ever seen.

What it had come from they could not determine; there was nothing dead or dying there.
The men glanced askance at the swamp where the black shining water had risen almost level with the edges of the road; but the Colonel and his staff, still mounted, rode coolly over it, and the regiment followed.
The corduroy road through the heavily wooded swamp which the 3rd Zouaves now followed was the only inlet to the noisy scene of local action, and the only outlet, too.
Except for watching the shells at Blue Bridge, the regiment had never been in battle, had never seen or heard a real battle; many had never even seen a wounded man.