MY FIRST BATTLE.
On Oct. 3rd, '61, Gen. Reynolds, thinking, possibly, that military etiquette required that he should return the call we had made him on Sept. 12th, came down, attended by his entire force and knocked at the door of our outer picket posts in the early morning hours with the evident purpose of making an informal visit to our camp. The knock was loud enough to arouse Col. Ed. Johnson, who went out and took command of the pickets in person in order that the reception given our visitors might be sufficiently warm and cordial. Under his personal direction every foot of the Federal advance was stubbornly contested. A little fellow belonging to our regiment finally grew tired of falling back and running up to Johnson said: "Colonel, let's charge 'em." Johnson, with that peculiar nervous twitching of the lip that characterized him in battle, commended the little fellow for his grit, but did not think it good military judgment to charge an entire army of five thousand men with a squad of fifty pickets. By 8 a. m. Gen. Reynolds had taken position in our front and his artillery had opened on our line. The main attack was expected on our right, and to its defence the 1st and 12th Ga. were assigned. Forming into line and lying down to escape the shot and shells from the Federal batteries, we awaited the attack. A nervous officer in the regiment kept walking up and down the line saying: "Keep cool, boys, keep cool," until Lieut. Ben Simmons of the Oglethorpes, suggested to him that he was wasting his breath, that the boys were cool. Gen. Jackson came down to our position to overlook the field, and while there a courier rode up and said: "General, the wagoners are cutting the traces and running off with the horses." The General grew very much excited and turning to his son, Harry Jackson, said, "Go up there, Henry and shoot the first wagoner that cuts a trace or leaves his team." Harry galloped off, trying to get his pistol from the holster. After the cannonade had lasted several hours an infantry attack was made on our left and was repulsed. Then Gen. Reynolds ordered an assault on our right. As the attacking column debouched from the woods on the further bank of the shallow Green Brier, we were double-quicked to the front to oppose their passage. Just then Shoemaker's Va. Battery began to throw grape shot into their ranks and the men refused to cross. The officers stormed at them and rode their horses into the ranks in the effort to force them to advance, but without avail. The column fell back to the road where they were joined by their right wing and by 1 p. m. the entire force was making tracks for Cheat Mountain. Thus ended my second lesson in "Jomini," or my first battle, if battle it can be called. The losses on both sides, probably, did not aggregate two hundred. The official report of the engagement was, however, so elaborate that it was subjected to criticism and ridicule by the merciless pen of Jno. M. Daniel, of the Richmond Examiner. It was reported that he said that there were more casualties from overwork and exhaustion in setting up type for that report than from shot and shell in the battle.
Among the wounded that day was a member of the Bainbridge company of our regiment, who had been shot down in the early morning as the pickets were retiring before the Federal advance and, whose comrades were forced to leave him where he fell. As the Union troops passed him again on their return a surgeon was asked as to the propriety of taking him along as a prisoner. "No," said he. "Give him a canteen of water. He'll be dead in a few hours." The wounded man looked up at him and quoting, as Dr. McIntyre would say, very liberally from profane history, told him that he didn't intend to die. They left him, nevertheless, and when, at 3 o'clock next morning, he was brought into camp, both of our surgeons pronounced his wound fatal. He dissented very strongly from their opinions, was sent to the hospital and came out a well man, saved largely, as I believe, by his dogged determination not to die.