The Confederacy, victorious, was advancing wrapped in flame and smoke.
At Savage's Station the long railroad bridge was now on fire; trains and locomotives burned fiercely; millions of boxes of hard bread, barrels of flour, rice, sugar, coffee, salt pork, cases of shoes, underclothing, shirts, uniforms, tin-ware, blankets, ponchos, harness, medical stores, were in flames; magazines of ammunition, flat cars and box cars loaded with powder, shells, and cartridges blazed and exploded, hurling jets and spouting fountains of fire to the very zenith.
And through the White Oak Swamp rode the Commander-in-chief of an army in full retreat, followed by his enormous staff and escort, abandoning the siege of Richmond, and leaving to their fate the wretched mass of sick and wounded in the dreadful hospitals at Liberty Hall.

And the red battle flags of the Southland fluttered on every hill.
Claymore's mixed brigade, still holding together, closed the rear of Porter's powder-scorched _corps d'armee_.
The Zouaves of the 3rd Regiment--what was left of them--marched as flankers; McDunn's battery, still intact, was forced to unlimber every few rods; and the pouring rain turned to a driving golden fire in the red glare of the guns, which lighted up the halted squadrons of the Lancers ranged always in support.
Every rod in retreat was a running combat.

In the darkness the discharge of the Zouaves' rifles ran from the guns' muzzles like streams of molten metal spilling out on the grass.

McDunn's guns spirted great lumps of incandescence; the fuses of the shells in the sky showered the darkness with swarming sparks.
Toward ten o'clock the harried column halted on a hill and bivouacked without fires, food, or shelter.

The Zouaves slept on their arms in the drenched herbage; the Lancers, not daring to unsaddle, lay down on the grass under their patient horses, bridle tied to wrist.