Forrest then resolved to stake the day on a charge against the enemy’s infantry before it could gain time to rest and while their cavalry was falling back.
We were then instructed to take advantage of the thick undergrowth and conceal our advance as much as possible until very close to the enemy and then rush the line with our six-shooters.
Forrest announced that he would take one end of our line and Rucker the other, and that we could not fail. We believed it, because he had never failed. Dismounting and drawing their pistols, Forrest and Rucker placed themselves in the line of battle and went forward with us. As we moved, there was not a word spoken in the throng—only a tense and anxious hurrying, as much as was possible in such a thicket. As we advanced, we were searching with anxious eyes every turn and undulation of the landscape to discover the enemy’s line, when suddenly the long, massed column, only a few feet in front of us, rose from a prostrate position to their knees and delivered in our faces one of the most withering rifle fires that our men had ever encountered. We were almost close enough to be powder-burned by the blaze from their long Springfield rifles, and the fire staggered us into a momentary confusion; but Forrest was there, and a single blast of his clarion voice was worth five thousand men in that vortex of danger and doubt. We were fighting an enemy that had two to our one, and nothing but our confidence that, in some way, Forrest would lead us to victory, could have sustained us. His escort moved as one man with him, and, with revolvers drawn, we charged the line of infantry before they could reload. Every man in our line had from five to ten shots, and we made them count. They broke in confusion and got away pellmell, but not before we had riddled them unmercifully. I never saw in any battle of the war as many arms and legs amputated as were lost at the field hospital at Brice’s Cross-Roads. It seemed that every pistol ball found its human mark. If it did not kill, it pierced an arm or a leg.
When the Union commander brought up his brigade of negro troops which had been held in reserve, he told the blacks to form in line and allow the defeated white troops to pass to their rear, and that they would reform and support them; but about the time this arrangement was made, Barteau’s regiment, which had been sent around to fall upon the rear of the Union column, made its appearance, and our artillery began to rake the retreating white troops with grape and canister. The brigade of blacks took to their heels without firing a shot and scattered through the woods like wild deer.
After the war, I knew an old negro in Corinth who was in the battle of Brice’s Cross-Roads, and I asked him one day if he ran away from the battle field. He replied: “No, boss, I didn’t run; I flew.”
A cold appraisement of this fight shows it to have been one of the most remarkable of all military history. With a force but little more than half as large as his enemy, this strangely gifted fighter of the Confederacy shattered a trained army of 8,000 men, and chased the remnant back to its base, forcing it to a speed seldom equaled in the wildest panics of war. The panoplied and militant host of Sturgis consumed nine days in the march from Memphis to Brice’s Cross-Roads, but, with Forrest on its trail, what was left of that host covered the same distance on the return in two nights and one day.
We captured 250 wagons and ambulances, eighteen pieces of artillery, 5,000 stands of small arms, 500,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, and all the enemy’s baggage and military stores.
But, notwithstanding the great victory, this battle took heavy toll from our ranks.
“Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with its banners at sunset was seen.
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay scattered and strewn.”
