The Battle of the Crater is another detailed battle of the American Cival War, now in its last bloody year, mentioned in Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox.
“Five forty-five: and at last it happened. To the men who were waiting in the front line it seemed to occur in slow motion: first a long, deep rumble, like summer thunder rolling along a faraway location, then, a swaying and swelling of the ground up ahead, with the solid earth rising to form a rounded hill, everything seeming very gradual and leisurely. Then the rounded hill broke apart, and a prodigious spout of flame and black smoke went up toward the sky, and the air was full of enormousness clods of earth as big as houses, of brass cannons and detached artillery wheels, of wrecked caissons and fluttering tents and weirdly tumbling human bodies; and there was a crash “like the noise of great thunders”, followed by other lesser explosions, and all of the firing line had turned into dust and smoke and flying debris, chocking and blinding men and threatening to engulf Burnside’s whole army corps.”
White Iron on the Anvil, A Still at Appomattox, Bruce Catton
