From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign: A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier SawDame, William Meade
History
From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign: A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw
Dame, William Meade
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives, Confederate
About five o'clock the Federal guns on the hill in our front broke out
again into a furious fire. It was a warning! We knew it meant that the
infantry were about to charge again. We got to our guns, and the Texans
stood to their arms. It seems that the balance of Hancock's Corps had
got up, and now, with Warren's, and part of Sedgwick's Corps, formed in
our front, Grant was going to make the supreme effort of the day, to
break our line.
_What we saw_ was that far down in the woods, heavy columns of men were
moving; the woods seemed to be full of them. The pickets, and our guns
opened on them at once. The next moment they appeared, three heavy lines
one close behind the other. As they reached the edge of the woods, our
lines were blazing with fire. But on they came! The first line was cut
to pieces, only to have its place taken by the next, and then, the next.
Closer and closer to our guns they pressed their bloody way, until they
were within fifty yards of us. Heavens! how those men did strive, and
strain to make their way against that tempest of bullets and canister!
It was too much for man to do! They stopped and stayed there, and fired
and shouted, under our withering fire. The carnage was fearful. Their
men were being butchered! Their lines had all fallen into utter
confusion. They could not come on! Despair suddenly seized them! The
next moment a panic stricken cloud of fugitives was fast vanishing from
our view, and the ground over which they had charged was blue with
corpses, and red with blood.
=Eggleston's Heroic Death=
Just here, we of the "Howitzer" suffered our first, and only, loss in
this day's fighting. Cary Eggleston, "No. 1" at third gun, had his arm
shattered, and almost cut away from his body, by a fragment of shell. He
quietly handed his rammer to John Ayres, who that instant came up to the
gun, and said, "Here Johnny, you take it and go ahead!" Then, gripping
his arm with his other hand, partly to stop the fast flowing blood, he
turned to his comrades, and said in his jocular way, "Boys, I can never
handle a sponge-staff any more. I reckon I'll have to go to teaching
school." Then he stood a while, looking at the men working the gun. They
urged him to go to the rear; he would not for a while. When he consented
to go, they wanted to send a man with him, but he refused, and walked
off by himself. As he passed back an infantry officer, seeing what an
awful wound he had, and the streaming blood, insisted that one of the
men should go and help him to the hospital. "No," he said; "I'm all
right, and you haven't got any men to spare from here." So, holding his
own arm, and compressing the artery with his thumb, he got to the
hospital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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