"This was about 2 P. M. The enemy had one battery close by Shiloh, and another near the Hamburgh road, both pouring grape and canister upon any volume of troops that advanced from the green point of water-oaks. Willich's Regiment had been repulsed, but a whole Brigade of McCook's Division advanced, beautifully deployed, and entered this dreaded wood. I ordered my Second Brigade, then commanded by Colonel T. Kilby Smith, (Colonel Stuart being wounded,) to form on its right, and my Fourth Brigade, Colonel Buckland, on its right, all to advance abreast with this Kentucky brigade before mentioned which I afterward found to be Rousseau's Brigade of McCook's Division. I gave personal direction to the twenty-four pounder guns, whose well-directed fire first silenced the enemy's guns to the left, and afterward at the Shiloh meeting-house. "Rousseau's Brigade moved in splendid order steadily to the front, sweeping everything before it, and at 4 P. M., we stood upon the ground of our original front line, and the enemy was in full retreat. I directed my several brigades to resume at once their original camps. I am now ordered by General Grant to give personal credit where I think it is due, and censure where I think it merited. I concede that General McCook's splendid division from Kentucky drove back the enemy along the Corinth road, which was the great centre of the field of battle and where Beauregard commanded in person, supported by Bragg's, Polk's, and Beckinridge's divisions. I think Johnson was killed by exposing himself in front of his troops at the time of their attack on Buckland's Brigade on Sunday morning, although in this I may be mistaken. "My division was made up of regiments perfectly new all having received their muskets for the first time at Paducah. None of them had ever been under fire, or beheld heavy columns of an enemy bearing down on them, as this did on last Sunday. To expect of them the coolness and steadiness of older troops would be wrong. They knew not the value of combination and organization. When individual fear seized them, the first impulse was to get away. My Third Brigade did break much too soon, and I am not yet advised where they were during Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. Colonel Hildebrand, its Commander, was as cool as any man I ever saw, and no one could have made stronger efforts to hold his men to their places than he did. He kept his own regiment, with individual exceptions, in hand an hour after Appler's and Mungen's regiments had left their proper field of action.