General Rosecrans says of him in his official report, "At Stone River he won universal admiration. Upon being flanked and compelled to retire, he withdrew his command more than a mile, under a terrible fire, in remarkable order, at the same time inflicting the severest punishment upon the foe. The constancy and steadfastness of his troops on the 31st of December enabled the reserve to reach the right of our army in time to turn the tide of battle, and changed a threatened rout into a victory." General Rosecrans showed himself dauntless in courage. When a shell took off the head of his faithful staff-officer, Garesche, riding by his side, to whom he was most tenderly attached, he only said, "I am _very_ sorry; we cannot help it. This battle must be won." Dashing up to a regiment lying on the ground waiting to be called into action, he said, while shot and shell were whizzing furiously around him, "Men, do you wish to know how to be safe? Shoot low. But do you wish to know how to be safest of all? Give them a blizzard and then charge with cold steel! Forward, men, and show what you are made of!" After the day's bloody battle, the troops lay all night on the cold ground where they had fought. "When," says the heroic General Rousseau, "I saw them parch corn over a few little coals into which they were permitted to blow a spark of life; when they carved steak from the loins of a horse which had been killed in battle, and ate, not simply without murmuring, but made merry over their distress, tears involuntarily rolled from my eyes." At midnight it rained upon the soldiers, and the fields became masses of mud; yet before daylight they stood at their guns. "On the third day," says Rosecrans, "the firing was terrific and the havoc terrible. The enemy retreated more rapidly than they had advanced. In forty minutes they lost two thousand men." All that night the Federals worked to entrench the front of the army. Saturday hundreds of wounded lay in the mud and rain, as the enemy had destroyed so many of our hospital tents. On Sunday morning it was found that the Confederates had departed, leaving twenty-five hundred of their wounded in Murfreesboro' for us to take care of. Burial parties were now sent out to inter the dead. The Union loss in killed and wounded was eight thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight; the enemy's loss ten thousand one hundred and twenty-five. Sheridan's next heavy fighting was at Chickamauga. The battle was begun by Bragg on Sept. 19, 1863. The right of our army had been broken to pieces, but General Thomas, the idol of his men, stood on the left like a rock, Sheridan assisting, and refused to be driven from the field. General Henry M. Cist, in his "Army of the Cumberland" says, "There is nothing finer in history than Thomas at Chickamauga." Sheridan lost over one-third of his four thousand men and ninety-six officers. The Federal loss was over sixteen thousand; the Confederate, over twenty thousand.