That night on the shore of the Tennessee River was one to be remembered. Wandering along the beach among the rows of wounded men waiting to be taken on board the transports, I found another member of the Seventieth Ohio named Silcott. He had a harrowing tale of woe to relate, in which nearly all his friends and acquaintances figured as corpses, and together we sat down on a bale of hay near the river’s edge. By this time the rain had set in. It was one of those peculiar, streaming, drenching, semi-tropical downpours, and it never ceased for a moment from that time until far into the next day. With darkness came untold misery and discomfort. After my companion had related the experiences of the day, I curled myself up on one side of the hay bale, while he occupied one edge of it, and soon fell asleep. Every few moments I was awakened by a terrible broadside, delivered from the two gunboats which lay in the center of the river a hundred yards or so above me. They were the _Lexington_ and the _A. O. Tyler_, I believe; wooden vessels, reconstructed from western steamboats and supplied with ponderous columbiads. These black monsters, for some reason, kept up their fire all through the night, and the roar of this cannonading and the shrieking of the shells, mingled with the thunders of the rainstorm, gave very little opportunity for slumber. Still, I managed to doze very comfortably between broadsides. And my recollection of the night is that from these peaceful naps I was aroused every now and then by what appeared to be a tremendous flash of lightning, followed by the most awful thunder ever heard on the face of the earth. These discharges seemed to me to lift me four or five inches from my water-soaked couch. To add to the general misery the transports which were bringing over Buell’s troops had a landing within twenty feet of my lodgment. All night long they wheezed and groaned and came and went, with their freight of humanity, and right by my side marched all night long the poor fellows who were being pushed out to the front to take the places on the battle line for the morrow. By this time the roadway was churned into mud knee deep, and as regiment after regiment went by with that peculiar slosh, slosh of marching men in mud, and the rattling of canteens against bayonets and scabbards, so familiar to the ear of the soldier, I could hear in the intervals the low complaining of the men and the urging of the officers: “Close up, boys, close up,” until it seemed to me that if there was ever such a thing as Hades on earth, I was in the fullest enjoyment of it. As fast as a transport unloaded its troops, the gangway was hauled in, the vessel dropped out, and another took the vacant place and the same thing was gone over again. Now and then a battery of artillery would come off the boat, the wheels would stick in the mud, and then a grand turmoil of half an hour would follow, during which time every man found