If we overshot the front line our bullets had some chance of taking effect later on. And thus the massing of the enemy which would have told with fearful effect upon us, had they succeeded in breaking through our lines, became a source of heavy loss to them under the circumstances.
I have always been thankful that there was no Joshua present to stay the downward course of the sun that day. For night found us with empty cartridge boxes, though many had borrowed largely from the boxes of the unresisting dead, who had no further use for them.
I fired eighty rounds from my breech-loading carbine, and the cartridge chamber became so hot that I could not bear my hand upon it, and I was actually afraid the thing would shoot back in my face when I would put in a new cartridge.
Night put an end to the great battle of Chickamauga. At once a defeat and victory for the Union army. A defeat, because we were compelled to fall back to prevent being surrounded by superior numbers, leaving the field, our dead, and many of our desperately wounded to the tender mercies of the most cruel enemy of modern times. A victory, in that Chickamauga, the bone of contention, remained in our hands.
In good order we marched back to Rossville, about half way from the battle-field to Chattanooga.
I had reason to be thankful for the moderation of the pace, for one of my shins had been used as a back-stop for an almost spent grape shot, and I became very lame before reaching our place of bivouac. I was a cripple for several days, and my limb bore a black spot for a month, but no pension was the result. It did not even leave an honorable scar.
That night we took position on Missionary Ridge and awaited the approach of the enemy, which was distinguished for that caution with which the burned child approaches the fire. For they did not strike our lines until about 3:00 P. M. next day, and then not hard enough to drive in our pickets. Monday night, about midnight, we silently moved down off the ridge and took position in hastily constructed earthworks immediately around Chattanooga, leaving our picket line at the foot of the ridge on the outside, to throw dust—or something—in the eyes of the rebels as they felt for our position in the night. Next morning, seeing the crest of the ridge clear, they moved suddenly upon our pickets and easily gobbled them; as they had no chance for speedy retreat up the steep side of the ridge. This is one of the saddest of the fortunes of war—a picket line being abandoned, to certain capture, as a vicarious sacrifice to secure the safety of an army. Our regiment had thirty-six men and officers—the remnant of Company H—taken in on this occasion, and they were given the freedom of the stockade prison—inside the “dead line”—at Andersonville, where they spent the winter in the full enjoyment of the luxuries of that famous place of entertainment provided for them by fiends in human form, whose wanton cruelty has made them the standing disgrace of the century in which they lived, whose inhumanity has no parallel in civilized history, and is not exceeded in the annals of savage warfare. Our boys found the kind attentions and high living so enervating as to be positively unhealthy, for the following spring only fifteen of them left it alive, and they were walking skeletons, half clothed in miserable rags.
On the 22d our brigade took position on Moccasin Point, on the north bank of the Tennessee River, immediately opposite the frowning brow of Lookout Mountain, where we guarded the river front and were at liberty to contemplate the rare beauty of this magnificent specimen of mountain scenery. Two miles in height of mountain slope! clad in the many colored robe of autumn; its base laved by the pellucid Tennessee. The songs of innumerable birds mingling with the rippling of the waters in a gentle roundelay—punctuated at intervals by the staccato notes of the festive rebel gun—followed by the not-too-gentle dropping of an ounce of lead uncomfortably near the venturous Yank who protruded his head beyond the bushes in order to enjoy the sylvan scene: reminding him that there is no rose without its thorn.
This was starvation camp. For a full month we were on less than quarter rations, and the normal condition of the stomach was ravenous. We soon cleaned the cornfield down to the last sprouted nubbin on the ground.
After I had been hungry for about two weeks, I struck a teamster, who had some corn for his mules; and begged him for an ear. He declined as the mules were over-worked, hauling our rations over sixty miles of mountain road. They were daily dying by scores, and there must be no lack of rations for those that were still able to pull.