That night the enemy slipped away, leaving hundreds and hundreds of his dead and wounded on the field. With a few lanterns our men then went about and tried to gather up the wounded; the dead were left till morning. There were 782 Union men lying there in their blood that long night, 608 of them out of a single small brigade. While mothers and sisters at home were praying for the safety of these dear ones at the front, their spirits that night were leaving their torn bodies in the dark and ascending heavenward. Five of my eight messmates of the day before were shot. It was not a question who was dead, or wounded, but who was not. Fifteen officers of our little half regiment were dead or wounded. The enemy lost more than one thousand men in trying to destroy that single brigade and its Ohio battery.
The burying party the next morning found nineteen dead Rebels lying together at one place. At another spot 182 Rebel corpses lay in a row covered by tarpaulins. The enemy had not had time to bury them.
It was a principle among our generals that if a command fought well in a battle or got cut all to pieces, that was the particular command to be put at the very front in the next hard scrap. And so it was that within two weeks my regiment was placed outside the breastworks at Corinth, to wait and receive another awful assault.
The night before the battle of Corinth the Fifth Iowa Regiment lay across the Purdy road, in the bright moonlight. I remained awake all night, talking with a comrade who shared my blanket with me. Poor Jimmy King! he survived the war only to be murdered later on a plantation in Mississippi. As we lay there in the wagon road, the awful losses of my regiment at Iuka kept us thinking there in the moonlight what would happen on the morrow. When morning came the firing opened, and for all that day the battle raged fiercely at the left and center left, we getting the worst of it, too. The Rebels were charging works that they themselves had built when they held the town during Halleck's siege. General Haccelman and many other of our officers had fallen. Our own division, though fighting some, had lost but few men. That evening an order came for us—Hamilton's Division—to assault the enemy's left flank at midnight. Before the hour came, however, the move was decided to be too dangerous, and we changed our position to one nearer the forts. All the night we lay there under the brightest moonlight I ever saw. Under the same quiet moonlight, and only six hundred yards away from us, also lay the victorious Rebel army. They believed Corinth as good as taken, but they had only captured our outer lines of forts. Yet it looked very bad for us. Every house in town was full of our wounded and our dead lay everywhere.
Once in the night I slipped away from the bivouac and hurried to the old Tishimingo Hotel, to see a lieutenant of my company, who had been shot through the breast. Never will I forget the horrible scenes of that night. The town seemed full of the groans of dying men. In one large room of the Tishimingo House surgeons worked all the night, cutting off arms and legs. I could not help my friend. It was too late, for he was dying. "Go back to the regiment," he said, smiling, "all will be needed."
It was a relief to me to get back into the moonlight and out of the horror, yet out there lay thousands of others in line, only waiting the daylight to be also mangled and torn like these. The moon shone so brightly the men in the lines, tired though they were, could scarcely sleep. There the thousands lay, the blue and the gray, under the same peaceful moon, worshiping the same God, and each praying for dear ones North and South they would never again see. God could not answer the prayers of the men in both armies that night. Had He done so, all would have been killed on the morrow. At early daybreak I again went to see my lieutenant. As I entered the building a cannonball from the enemy crashed through the house and killed four soldiers by the stairway. My friend, with many others, was being carried out to die elsewhere.
It was soon full day. In one of the rooms I saw the floors, tables, and chairs covered with amputated limbs, some white and some broken and bleeding. There were simply bushels of them, and the floor was running blood. It was a strange, horrible sight,—but it was war. Yes, it was "hell." I hastened back to the lines. Nine o'clock came, and now we knew that the great assault was to be made. We looked for it against our own division, as we lay in the grass waiting. Suddenly we heard something, almost like a distant whirlwind. My regiment rose to its feet, fired a few moments at scattering Rebels in our front, and were amazed to see a great black column, ten thousand strong, moving like a mighty storm-cloud out of the woods and attacking the forts and troops at our left. Instantly we changed direction a little and, without further firing, witnessed one of the greatest assaults of any war. It was the storming of Fort Robinett. The cloud of Rebels we had seen divided itself into three columns. These recklessly advanced on the forts, climbing over the fallen trees and bending their heads against the awful storm of grape and canister from all our cannon. A perfect blaze of close range musketry, too, mowed them down like grass. Even a foe could feel pity to see brave men so cruelly slaughtered.
When the assault had failed and the noise of battle was stilled, I hurried down in front of Robinett. My canteen was full of water and I pressed it to the lips of many a dying enemy—enemy no longer. Our grape shot had torn whole companies of men to pieces. They lay in heaps of dozens, even close up to the works. General Rogers, who had led a brigade into the hopeless pit, lay on his back, dead, with his flag in his hand. He was the fifth one to die carrying that flag. When I reached him some cruel one had stripped him of his boots. Another had taken his fine gold watch.
In this attack on Corinth the brave Southerners lost 5000 wounded, and we buried 1423 of their dead on the battlefield. Our own loss had been 2200 dead and wounded. That night I stood guard under an oak tree on the battlefield among the unburied dead. Many of the wounded, even, had not yet been gathered up. The moon shone as brightly as the night before, while thousands who had lain there under its peaceful rays before the battle were now again sleeping, but never to waken.
Our regiment now pursued the flying Rebels with great vigor. The quantities of broken batteries, wagons, tents, knapsacks, guns, etc., strewn along the roads behind them were immense. At the Hatchie River the Rebels were momentarily headed off by a division under Hurlbut that had hurried across from Bolivar. A seven hours' battle was fought at the bridge, but the Rebels got away in another direction. Possibly the best friend I had in the world, save my kin, was killed at that bridge. It was Lieutenant William Dodd, a classmate in school. His head was shot off by a cannonball just as his regiment was charging at the bridge.