Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel Prisons — John Shaqi
Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel PrisonsDay, W. W. (William Worthy)
History
Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel Prisons
Day, W. W. (William Worthy)
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Prisoners and prisons
The rebels soon found a gap at the right of my Regt. and began to pour
in past our right flank. I was lying on the ground loading and firing
fast as possible when I saw the rebels charging past our right, with
their arms at a trail, looking up I discovered that there was not a man
to the right of me in the Regt. I did not wait for orders but struck out
for the rear in a squad of one. I could not see a man of my regiment so
I concluded to help support the battery, accordingly I rushed up nearly
in front of one of the guns just as they gave the Johnies twenty pounds
of canister. That surprised me. I found I was in the wrong place, twenty
pounds of canister fired through me was liable to lay me up, so I filed
left and came in front of the other gun just as the men were ready to
fire. They called out to me to hurry as they wanted to fire, facing the
gun and leaning over to the right I called to them to fire away and they
did fire away with a vengeance. After this things seem mixed up in my
mind. I remember getting to the rear of that gun, of hearing the bullets
whistling, of seeing the woods full of rebs, of thinking I shall get hit
yet, of trying to find a good place to hide and finally of stumbling and
falling, striking my breast on my canteen, and then oblivion.
How long I remained unconscious I never knew, probably not long, but
when I came to my understanding the firing had ceased in my immediate
vicinity except now and then a scattering shot. I started again for the
rear and had not gone more than a quarter of a mile before I found Gen.
Baird urging a lot of stragglers to rally and protect a flag which he
was holding. Here I found Capt. W. A. Collins and several other men of
my Company. When he saw me he asked me if I was hurt. I told him “no,
not much, I had a couple of cannons fired in my face and fell on my
canteen which had knocked the breath out of me but that I would be all
right in a little while.” He then told me I had better go to the rear to
the hospital. To this I objected, telling him that I had rather stay
with the “boys.”
We then marched to the rear and halted in a corn field. The stragglers
from the regiment began to come in and the brigade was soon together
again, but we did no more fighting that day. But just before night we
were marched to the front and formed in line of battle. About 8 o’clock
in the evening Johnson’s Division attempted to relieve another division
in our front, Wood’s, I think it was, when the latter division poured a
galling fire into the former, supposing they were rebels. Some of the
balls came through the ranks of the 10th, whereupon Company K opened
fire without orders and a sad mistake it proved for it revealed our
position and a rebel battery opened on us with shells. To say that they
made it lively for us is to say but part of the truth. The woods were
fairly ablaze with bursting shells. The way they hissed and shrieked and
howled and crashed was trying to the nerves of a timid man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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