UNDER FIRE
After the prisoners were placed here near the Yankee batteries, so as to be exposed to the fire of the Confederate guns, the Confederate batteries did not fire a great deal. What shelling was done was mostly at night. Some of the shells burst over the stockade and the pieces would fall around, but I don't remember that any of the prisoners were hit. It was rather uncomfortable, though, to lie there and watch the big shells sailing through the air, which we could see at night by the fuse burning, and sometimes burst above us, instead of bursting in or above the Yankee forts 100 yards further on, and then listen at the fragments humming through the air and hear them strike the ground with a dull thud among the tents. We would first hear a distant boom, two miles away towards Charleston, and then begin to look and listen for the shell which was sure to follow that boom. Peter Akers used to say, "That is trusting too much to the fuse to shoot two miles and expect the shell to burst 100 hundred yards beyond the stockade."
The prisoners were located about midway between two Yankee forts, Gregg and Wagner. Through the interstices between the pine logs forming the stockade, we could see indistinctly Fort Sumter, which looked like a pile of ruins. The outer walls of brick had been battered to pieces by the Yankee batteries on Morris Island and the breaks filled up with sand bags. The city of Charleston was also visible, though indistinctly. We were not permitted to go near the stockade.
One day a Yankee monitor, which, with other blockading ships, lay near the entrance of the harbor or bay, moved up about opposite the stockade, and engaged in a fight with the Confederate batteries. We could see the Confederate shots strike the water and skip along towards the Monitor, which pretty soon got enough of it, and moved out of range.