Reaching the bank we sat down to listen, and heard a man struggling out in the river, crying, “Help, help, or I shall drown.” The agonized voice of the despairing wretch, as it rang out over the broad water, amid the stillness and darkness of inevitable death, conveyed to the mind an image of the horror which must weigh upon the heart of one doomed knowingly to eternal death. We could hear his strangling effort as he spouted the gurgling water from his mouth, and then another cry for help, answered this time by a voice calling from the gloom beyond, “Hold up a little longer, we are coming.” The first impulse, dictated by the desperate and savage experiences of the day, was to open fire and drive off his rescuers, but a more humane feeling prevailed, and we quietly listened, soon dimly discerning the boat rapidly approaching the Virginia shore, and landing two or three hundred yards above us, where the Federals had been crossing all day. The space of beach or shore from the foot of the bluff to the water’s edge is about sixty yards wide, and after crossing from the island, the Federals had to go down the river the two hundred or more yards to reach the road leading up on the bluff. This space was still strewn with dead and wounded men waiting removal or burial, so that when we moved up towards the landing place we found it difficult, in the deep darkness prevailing under the bluff, to avoid stepping on the bodies—in fact we did this frequently—those with life still in them always giving us notice of it. Approaching the landing I suggested to Lieutenant Berkeley that he hold his men while I went forward alone to reconnoiter, which he did, and I walked up to the mass of people gathered about the landing. It was so dark they could not distinguish me from their own men, and making the best investigation I could, I reported to Berkeley that there were 1,500 of them. Lieutenant Charley Berkeley had as brave a heart in him as any of the name, and when I say that, it means he was among the “bravest of the brave,” for no men ever did more gallant service, were more patriotically devoted to Old Virginia, or were more loyal to the Southern cause, and few there be in all our glorious Southland who suffered more to promote the success of that cause than those who bore the name of Berkeley.