"'The brigade must advance to the woods.'
"'General, don't you remember'—
"'Go to the rear, sir; my troops are now in position.'
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BRIGADIER-GENERAL J. H. VAN ALLEN. (Aide-de-Camp to General Hooker.) |
"There were few, if any, stretcher bearers at the front, and wounded men that had lost a leg or an arm dragged themselves to the field-hospital; and the surgeons of some regiments which had not been engaged in the battle sat upon a log in idleness, and refused, with a great display of dignity, to assist the suffering who were brought to them, because they did not belong to their commands. This shameful conduct, which I often witnessed, exasperated the officers and soldiers; and they compelled the surgeons to discharge their duty in a number of cases by threatening to shoot them. The heat was very severe; many cannoneers divested themselves of their uniforms while they were working; and a number of the skirmishers, who were posted in the open field, and obliged to lie low without any shelter, were sometimes afflicted by sunstroke. 'I will win a star or a coffin in this battle,' remarked a colonel as he was riding to the scene of conflict in which a bullet checked his noble military aspirations. 'To take a soldier without ambition is to pull off his spurs.' 'I have got my leave of absence now,' gladly said an officer, whose application had always been refused at headquarters, when he left the regiment to go to the hospital. The appearance of a rabbit causes an excitement and a chase upon all occasions, and one ran in front of the line as the action commenced; and the birds were flying wildly among the trees, as if they anticipated a storm; and a soldier shouted, 'Stop him, stop him! I could make a good meal if I had him.' 'This is English neutrality,' an intelligent metal moulder remarked, in examining the fragment of a shell, and explaining the process of its manufacture to the company; while the rebel batteries every minute added some specimens to his collection. The officials in Richmond published at this time an order, directing that the clothing should be taken from the bodies of their dead and issued to the living. They always stripped the dead and the dying upon every field; and I noticed that one man who had been stunned, and afterward effected his escape, wore merely a shirt and hat when he entered the lines. An officer who was going the rounds in the night was surprised to find one of his most faithful men who returned no answer to his inquiries; and supposing that he had been overcome by fatigue, and fallen asleep, grasped his hands to awaken him: but they were cold with death. The soldier, killed upon his post of duty, rested in the extreme front, with his musket by his side, and face toward the enemies of his country. General Whipple, the able commander of the third division of the corps, was mortally wounded by a sharp-shooter who was one-third of a mile from him; and a priest administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church upon the spot where he fell, in the presence of his weeping staff and soldiers, by whom he was greatly beloved. A brigade made a reconnoissance in the forest at one P.M., and captured forty sharp-shooters who were perched upon the limbs of lofty oaks, and could not descend and escape before this force advanced.
"The rebels ascertained the location of the trains upon the north bank of the Rappahannock, opened a battery upon them, and a squad of three hundred prisoners uttered a yell of joy when they saw a cannon-ball enter a large tent which was crowded with the dying and disabled. The direction of the firing was changed, and caused utter dismay when some of the number were killed by the missiles that were hurled by their comrades in the army of Lee."
| OFFICERS SETTING OUT TO MAKE CALLS OF CEREMONY ON THEIR GENERALS. |