I have found many notes of their rough experience in the march and in the field. In McClellan’s retreat in the Peninsula, in July, 1862, “it is all our men can do to draw their feet out of the mud. We marched one mile through mud, without exaggeration, one foot deep,—a good deal of the way over my boots, and with short rations; on one day nothing but liver, blackberries, and pennyroyal tea.”—“At Fredericksburg we lay eleven hours in one spot without moving, except to rise and fire.” The next note is, “cracker for a day and a half,—but all right.” Another day, “had not left the ranks for thirty hours, and the nights were broken by frequent alarms. How would Concord people,” he asks, “like to pass the night on the battle-field, and hear the dying cry for help, and not be able to go to them?” But the regiment did good service at Harrison’s Landing, and at Antietam, under Colonel Parker; and at Fredericksburg, in December, Lieutenant-Colonel Prescott loudly expressed his satisfaction at his comrades, now and then particularizing names: “Bowers, Shepard and Lauriat are as brave as lions.”[191] At the battle of Gettysburg, in July, 1863, the brigade of which the Thirty-second Regiment formed a part, was in line of battle seventy-two hours, and suffered severely. Colonel Prescott’s regiment went in with two hundred and ten men, nineteen officers. On the second of July they had to cross the famous wheat-field, under fire from the rebels in front and on both flanks. Seventy men were killed or wounded out of seven companies. Here Francis Buttrick, whose manly beauty all of us remember,[192] and Sergeant Appleton, an excellent soldier, were fatally wounded. The Colonel was hit by three bullets. “I feel,” he writes, “I have much to be thankful for that my life is spared, although I would willingly die to have the regiment do as well as they have done. Our colors had several holes made, and were badly torn. One bullet hit the staff which the bearer had in his hand. The color-bearer is brave as a lion; he will go anywhere you say, and no questions asked; his name is Marshall Davis.” The Colonel took evident pleasure in the fact that he could account for all his men. There were so many killed, so many wounded,—but no missing. For that word “missing” was apt to mean skulking. Another incident: “A friend of Lieutenant Barrow complains that we did not treat his body with respect, inasmuch as we did not send it home. I think we were very fortunate to save it at all, for in ten minutes after he was killed the rebels occupied the ground, and we had to carry him and all our wounded nearly two miles in blankets. There was no place nearer than Baltimore where we could have got a coffin, and I suppose it was eighty miles there. We laid him in two double blankets, and then sent off a long distance and got boards off a barn to make the best coffin we could, and gave him burial.”