Breckenridge, the rebel, had forty thousand men at our rear, but we were too well fortified for him to make an attack. On the eighth a force of rebel cavalry attacked our guards and sick at Millikin’s Bend, but they were repulsed and driven back with a slight loss.
On the 11th a continual firing was kept up all day. One man in Company B of our regiment was killed. He was hit in the back with a piece of one of our own shells, while he was lying on his bunk.
On the 12th a detail from our regiment planted some heavy eighty-four pound guns in our rear and fifteen thousand men were sent back to Black River to reinforce our rear guard which was looking for an attack every hour, as things were getting desperate with the rebel army which was cooped up in Vicksburg.
On the 14th the rebels opened fire with some small mortars, on General Herring’s troops. Several were killed and wounded by mortar shells. They also threw some shells into Logan’s division.
At night some of our boys met the rebs half way between our lines and exchanged coffee for the papers which the rebels were printing in Vicksburg. We found much valuable information in these papers.
Since they had been cooped up in Vicksburg, the rebels had been in communication with Breckenridge’s army by means of some spies. We also often traded coffee with the rebels for tobacco or something which we wanted, while we were on picket duty.
On the 16th the rebels opened fire with some of their heavy guns on our rifle pits which we were advancing within a short distance of their forts. But they were soon silenced by our sharpshooters.
On the 17th, a battery of our twenty-four pound siege guns threw hot shot into the city and tried to set the houses on fire, but they failed to do much damage, as the buildings were so far apart. The most of them had been pounded down by Porter’s big mortar shells, and very many of the citizens had dug out houses in the railroad cut, sixty feet below the top of the ground. Some of the houses had been dug out in solid rock and they were proof against Porter’s big shells that rolled to the height of four miles, then dropped and went into the ground fifteen feet, then they exploded and tore out holes in the ground as large as a house.
It seemed impossible for any living being to exist in such a hell through forty-eight days in the presence of those death-dealing monsters. The earth and air were both filled with iron and lead.
On the morning of the 18th, our company was relieved out of the rifle pits by Companies C and E. While we were yet standing there two of the boys were killed by rebel sharpshooters. One was out of Company C and the other out of Company E. The bullets passed through the loop in our head logs and then went through the boys’ heads. We were only sixty yards from the fort at this time. Admiral Porter used his fleet of mortars and ironclads continually. There was neither rest nor quiet during those hot days, made still hotter by the whizzing shells and zipping minnie balls.