But the sanguinary nature of the contention is best illustrated by a simple suggestion of proportions. Official reports show that on both sides the casualties—killed, wounded, and missing—embraced the enormous proportion of thirty-three per cent. of the troops actually engaged.

On the Union side there were over a score of regiments in which the losses in this single fight exceeded 49.4 per cent., which was the heaviest loss sustained by a German regiment at any time during the Franco-German war. The “charge of the Light Brigade” at Balaklava has been made famous in song and history, yet there were thirty Union regiments that each lost ten per cent. more men at Chickamauga, and many Confederate regiments whose mortality exceeded this.

Longstreet’s command in less than two hours lost nearly forty-four per cent. of its strength, and of the troops opposed to a portion of their splendid assaults, Steedman’s and Brannan’s commands lost respectively forty-nine and thirty-eight in less than four hours, and single regiments a far heavier percentage.

Of the Confederate regiments sustaining the heaviest percentages of loss (in killed, wounded, and missing,—the last a scarcely appreciable fraction) the leading ones were:

Regiment.Per cent.
Tenth Tennessee68.0
Fifth Georgia61.1
Second Tennessee60.2
Fifteenth and Thirty-seventh Tennessee59.9
Sixteenth Alabama58.6
Sixth and Ninth Tennessee57.9
Eighteenth Alabama56.3
Twenty-second Alabama55.2
Twenty-third Tennessee54.1
Twenty-ninth Mississippi52.7
Fifty-eighth Alabama51.7
Thirty-seventh Georgia50.1
Sixty-third Tennessee49.7
Forty-first Alabama48.6
Thirty-second Tennessee48.3
Twentieth Tennessee48.0
First Arkansas45.1
Ninth Kentucky44.3

These are only a few of the cases in which it was possible to compute percentages of casualties, the number of effectives taken into battle not having been mentioned, but they serve to illustrate the sanguinary severity of the fight and the heroism of the troops.

CHAPTER XXXII.

FAILURE TO FOLLOW SUCCESS.