After the lucky escape from Spring Hill, our foe utilized to the fullest possible extent every natural advantage in preparing for a defense at Franklin. Earthworks were hurriedly thrown up, and every house and fence was intelligently utilized to retard the momentum of an open attack. The soldier who undertakes to tell what he actually sees of a battle as extensive and terrible and bloody as was the battle of Franklin has but little to tell, and so I shall attempt no description; but that dreadful conflict of November 30, 1864, is known to every student of history as one of the great disasters of the Confederacy. There were a greater number of Confederate officers killed at Franklin than at Shiloh, Chickamauga, or Gettysburg, to say nothing of the bloody and one-sided slaughter of our men. I never shall forget the gloom that settled over the ranks of our beaten troops. The blunder at Spring Hill seemed to smite the hearts of our men as they contemplated its deadly cost; and yet that great mass of men, with embittered souls, prepared to press onward. The night following the battle the Union Army withdrew to Nashville and entrenched for the expected assault. Though vastly outnumbered, Hood moved at once and invested the city of Nashville. From the 2d to the 15th of December we held the enemy within his fortifications. On the 15th he moved out and tried in vain to break our line. On the 16th he renewed the sortie with increased masses of troops, and our left wing collapsed and forced Hood to retreat. And what a retreat! No one who participated in it can ever forget the suffering and hopeless anguish of that weary, running march. The cause for which this grand army had so nobly fought, tottering toward its every battle field, was now living only by the gameness of its defenders. Defeated and shattered amid the desolation of winter, hungry, half-naked, and foot-sore, this suffering host turned sadly from the capital city of one of its own loyal States, and followed its haggard gaze toward the deeper South, with the benumbed feeling that somewhere, somehow it would make another stand, if only to give the last impulse of its fast-ebbing energies to the spirit of its dying cause and perish with its hopes. General Forrest was ordered to cover the retreat, and the brigade of General Walthall’s Mississippians was assigned as his infantry support. Knowing our sad plight, flushed with victory, and eager for the finish, the Union Army started in pursuit with 10,000 well-mounted and well-equipped cavalry under General Wilson. Forrest had about 5,000 cavalry, and Walthall’s men numbered about 2,800; but as they were almost destitute of shoes and clothing of every kind, we had to carry many of the men in the wagon train, using them only when we were forced to stop and fight. Hood had planned to get to the Tennessee River, where we had a pontoon bridge, at Mussel Shoals.