“Ain’t got no quartermaster.”
“Well, then to your commanding officer—to your regiment.”
“Ain’t got no commanding officer nowher’ this side o’ God, nor no regiment.”
“Then who the devil are you, and where do you belong?”
“Don’t belong nowher’. I’ll jest tell you, Cap, how it is. I live in the south line of New York State, and when I heard that the rebs had got inter Pennsylvany, forty of us held a meetin’ and ’pinted me Cap’n. So we came down here cross country, and ’rived this a’ternoon, and findin’ fightin’ goin’ on, went straight for the bush. And gettin’ cover, we shot the darndest sight of rebels you ever did see. And now all our ammynition is expended, I’ve come to town for more, for ther’s some of ’em still left—who want killin’ badly.”
“See here, my friend,” I replied. “You don’t know it, but you’re nothing but a bushwhacker, and anybody has a right to hang or shoot you out of hand. Do you see that great square tent?” Here I pointed to the general’s marquee. “Go in there and report yourself and get enrolled.” And the last I saw of him he was stumbling over the sticks in the right direction. This was my first experience of a real guerillo—a character with whom I was destined to make further experience in after days.
An earlier incident was to me extremely curious. There was in our battery a young gentleman named Stewart Patterson, noted for his agreeable, refined manners. He was the gunner of our cannon No. Two. We had brass Napoleons. At the distance of about one mile the rebels were shelling us. Patterson brought his gun to bear on theirs, and the two exchanged shots at the same instant. Out of the smoke surrounding Patterson’s gun I saw a sword-blade fly perhaps thirty feet, and then himself borne by two or three men, blood flowing profusely. The four fingers of his right hand had been cut away clean by a piece of shell.
At the instant I saw the blade flash in its flight, I recalled seeing precisely the same thing long before in Heidelberg. There was a famous duellist who had fought sixty or seventy times and never received a scratch. One day he was acting
as second, when the blade of his principal, becoming broken at the hilt by a violent blow, flew across the room, rebounded, and cut the second’s lip entirely open. It was remarkable that I should twice in my life have seen such a thing, in both instances accompanied by wounds. Long after I met Patterson in Philadelphia, I think, in 1883. He did not recognise me, and gave me his left hand. I said, “Not that hand, Patterson, but the other. You’ve no reason to be ashamed of it. I saw the fingers shot off.”
But on that night there occurred an event which, in the end, after years of suffering, caused the deepest sorrow of my life. As we were not firing, I and the rest of the men of the gun were lying on the ground to escape the shells, but my brother, who was nothing if not soldierly and punctilious, stood upright in his place just beside me. There came a shell which burst immediately, and very closely over our heads, and a piece of it struck my brother exactly on the brass buckle in his belt on the spine. The blow was so severe that the buckle was bent in two. It cut through his coat and shirt, and inflicted a slight wound two inches in length. But the blow on the spine had produced a concussion or disorganisation of the brain, which proved, after years of suffering, the cause of his death. At first he was quite senseless, but as he came to, and I asked him anxiously if he was hurt, he replied sternly, “Go back immediately to your place by the gun!” He was like grandfather Leland.