CHAPTER XII
Battle of Sharpsburg, Continued
Marching through Frederick—Barbara Fritchie and Stonewall Jackson—Commissariat broken down—Green corn for rations—Stampede of horses of a cavalry regiment—D. H. Hill's horse shot—Longstreet's staff served guns of Washington Artillery—Cannoneers killed—Colonel John R. Cooke's gallant fight—Am wounded and carried off the field.
When the army marched through Frederick City it was fine weather, and the poet Whittier has told of Barbara Frietchie and Stonewall Jackson—a stirring poem in winning lines, but quite without fact at bottom. But that matters not in the least. The lines are good and we can well afford to throw in with all the hard words and abuse of those days, the poet's ideas about our Stonewall.
The country through which we marched was beautiful, rich, and fertile, but we were constantly hungry. There were two lines of Whittier's unquestionably true:
"Fair as a garden of the Lord,
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde."
In all parts of the army straggling was principally caused by want of food. The commissariat had about broken down and the troops had recourse to anything.
The fields were full of ripened corn, of which too much was eaten. Parched and salted it would help a little, but eaten as it was, bad attacks of diarrhoea followed and such sickness became serious.