It was Parsons’s eight-gun battery, supported by an Ohio brigade (Germans) in command of General Jackson, of Hopkinsville, Ky. They would not stand the charge, but ran in great disorder, leaving the battery in our possession. In attempting to rally them General Jackson was killed, and his body fell in our line of march. On a hill in the rear of where we captured the Parsons battery was Bush’s Indiana battery, supported by the First and Twenty-first Wisconsin Regiments and another brigade of infantry. In charging this battery we uncovered our left flank, and were subjected to an enfilade fire from the enemy, which played havoc with our men. We had ten men killed in attempting to carry the colors. We lost some two hundred and fifty men in a short time. Our boys got so close to the battery that the smoke covered them. Young Tom Lanier was killed some thirty feet from the battery, not by the artillery, because we were under the crest of the hill, and the pieces could not be depressed so as to reach us, but the men supporting the battery were the ones that caused most of our trouble. Colonel Patterson was slightly wounded in the wrist, but he tied a handkerchief around it and continued to give orders until a grapeshot hit his mustache, going through his head, killing him instantly. Captain Pilcher was quartermaster, but he was in the thickest of the fray, receiving a wound that came near causing his death. Company B lost fourteen killed and thirteen wounded. Among the dead was a young man named Robert S. Hamilton. He came to Nashville in 1860, and was a proof reader in the Southern Methodist Publishing House. We were very intimate friends. He was an ardent secessionist, while his family in Kentucky were divided on the war question. In the charge Robert was shot through the forehead, and fell not far from where Tom Lanier and gallant Jack Goodbar fell. Colonel Fields detailed me to stay and take care of the wounded and do the best I could to bury the dead. After getting all the wounded off, with the aid of reflected rays from a burning barn which the exploding shells fired, I penned the following: BATTLEFIELD, PERRYVILLE, KY., October 8, 1862. _Mrs. W. C. Hamilton, Lexington, Ky._: Robert was killed in gallant charge this evening. Will take care of remains until you arrive. MARCUS B. TONEY. Mrs. Hamilton was Robert’s sister-in-law, and I wrote to her because his brother, W. C. Hamilton, was a Union man, and Robert never wrote a line to him; but all his correspondence was with his sister-in-law, and he always read her letters to me; therefore I wrote to the sister-in-law rather than to the brother. The blue and the gray mingled together all that night removing the wounded. I approached one of the blue and asked him if he would deliver the note to Mrs. Hamilton, and he promised me that he would.