General Lyon, with three brigades and two batteries, Totten’s six pieces, and Dubois, with four, came down the Springfield road and attacked our main army in front. Colonel Franz Sigel, with one brigade and one light battery, marched down to the left, or east of the road and into our rear, and attacked the cavalry camp with his artillery, as has already been stated. Poor Sigel! it would be sufficient to describe his disastrous defeat to merely repeat their official reports. But I would only say that his battery was lost and his command scattered and driven from the field in utter confusion and demoralization in the early part of the day and that it was followed some five miles by our cavalry and badly cut up, he himself escaping capture narrowly by abandoning his carriage and colors and taking to a cornfield. It was said by the Federals that he reached Springfield with one man before the battle was ended. But the forces led by the brave and gallant Lyon fought bravely. The losses are given officially as follows: Federals: killed, 223; wounded, 721; missing, 291. Total, 1235. Confederates: killed, 265; wounded, 800; missing, 30. Total, 1095.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAR IN MISSOURI
Personal Characteristics—Two Braggarts—Joe Welch—William Hood—We Enter Springfield—Bitter Feeling in Missouri—Company Elections—Measles and Typhoid—Carthage, and My Illness There—We Leave Carthage—Death of Captain Taylor—Winter Quarters—Furloughed—Home Again.
A battle—or danger—will often develop some characteristics that nothing else will bring out.
One Gum was a shabby little man, mounted on a shabby little mustang pony; in fact his horse was so shabby that he would tie him, while we were at Dallas, away off in the brush in a ravine and carry his forage half a mile to feed him rather than have him laughed at. Gum was a Missourian, and got into the company somehow, with his fiddle, and aside from his fiddling he was of little use in camps. During the time we were kept slowly moving along in the rear of our infantry, engaged mainly in the unprofitable business of dodging balls and shells that were constantly whizzing near our heads, Captain Taylor was very anxious that his company should act well under fire and would frequently glance back, saying: “Keep your places, men.” Gum, however, was out of place so often he finally became personal, “Keep in your place, Gum.” At this Gum broke ranks and came trotting up on his little pony, looking like a monkey with a red cap on, for, having lost his hat, he had tied a red cotton handkerchief around his head. When opposite the captain he reined up, and with a trembling frame and in a quivering voice, almost crying, he said: “Captain, I can’t keep my place. I am a coward, and I can’t help it.” Captain Taylor said, sympathetically: “Very well, Gum; go where you please.” It so happened that a few days later we passed his father’s house, near Mount Vernon, and the captain allowed him to stop and remain with his father. And thus he was discharged. At this stage of the war we had no army regulations, no “red tape” in our business. If a captain saw fit to discharge one of his men he told him to go, and he went without reference to army headquarters or the War Department. I met Gum in November, fleeing from the wrath of the home guards, as a man who had been in the Confederate Army could not live in safety in Missouri.
One of our men, in the morning when I was forming the company, was so agitated that it was a difficult matter to get him to call his number. During the day a ball cut a gash about skin deep and two inches in length across the back of his neck, just at the edge of his hair. As a result of this we were two years in getting this man under fire again, though he would not make an honest confession like Gum, but would manage in some mysterious way to keep out of danger. When at last we succeeded in getting him in battle at Thompson’s Station in 1863, he ran his iron ramrod through the palm of his right hand and went to the rear. Rather than risk himself in another engagement he deserted, in the fall of that year, and went into the Federal breastworks in front of Vicksburg and surrendered. This man was named Wiley Roberts.
Captain Hale, of Company D, was rather rough-hewn, but a brave, patriotic old man, having not the least patience with a thief, a coward, or a braggart. While he had some of the bravest men in his company that any army could boast of, he had one or two, at least, that were not among these, as the two stalwart bullies who were exceedingly boastful of their prowess, of the ease with which Southern men could whip Northerners, five to one being about as little odds as they cared to meet. This type of braggart was no novelty, for every soldier had heard that kind of talk at the beginning of the war. While we were moving out in the morning when Sigel’s battery was firing and Captain Hale was coolly riding along at the head of his company, these two men came riding rapidly up, one hand holding their reins while the other was pressed across the stomach, as if they were in great misery, saying, when they sighted their commander: “Captain Hale, where must we go? we are sick.” Captain Hale looked around without uttering a word for a moment, his countenance speaking more indignation than language could express. At last he said, in his characteristic, emphatic manner: “Go to h——l, you d——d cowards! You were the only two fighting men I had until now we are in a battle, and you’re both sick. I don’t care when you go.” Other incidents could be given where men in the regiment were tried and found wanting, but the great majority were brave and gallant men who never shirked duty or flinched from danger.