The weather was hot, and most of the dead had been killed early Sunday morning, and dissolution had already commenced. The soldiers gathered the bodies up and placed them in wagons, hauling them near to the trench, and piling them up like cord wood.
We were furnished with plenty of whiskey, and the boys believed that it would have been impossible to have performed the job without it.
When the grave was ready, we placed the bodies therein, two deep; the father, brother, husband and lover, all to lie till Gabriel’s trumpet shall sound. All the monument reared to those brave men was a board, nailed to a tree at the head of the trench, upon which I cut with my pocket knife, the words: “125 rebels.”
We buried our Union boys in a separate trench, and on another board were these words: “35 Union.” Many of our men had been taken away and buried separately by their comrades. It was night when we finished the task, some of the squad, “half seas over” with liquor, but they could not be blamed, for it was a hard job. The next day we burned the dead horses and mules.
A few words about the great battle of Shiloh, as an old veteran views it, as well as some words deduced from history.
It has often been told that the enemy surprised us at Shiloh; that the men were asleep in their tents and were even bayoneted there. This most certainly is erroneous. The Confederate officers report that early Sunday morning, while they were planning the attack, their discussion was abruptly brought to an end by the Union out posts commencing an attack on them.
Our soldiers were not surprised in the sense of being taken off their guard.
It was a surprise in the sense, that Gen. Grant and his officers did not expect an attack in force by the enemy, or if they did, they made a great mistake in not being prepared. The fact remains, we were not ready to receive the enemy; not a shovelfull of earth had been thrown up for protection, and the several divisions were scattered so as not to form a continuous battle line. If mistake it was on the part of Gen. Grant, he profited by it, for such a thing did not happen ever afterward. That the first day’s battle of Shiloh was a stubborn and desperate battle cannot be denied. Badeau, in his military history of Gen. Grant, says: “For several hours of the first day there was as desperate fighting as was ever seen on the American Continent, and that, in proportion to the number engaged, equaled any contest during the rebellion.”
Gen. W. T. Sherman said: “I never saw such terrible fighting afterward.”
Gen. Grant has said: “Shiloh was the severest battle fought in the west during the war, and but few in the east equaled it for hard, determined fighting.” Again he says in his Memoirs, speaking of Shiloh: “I saw an open field the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing in any direction, stepping on dead bodies without the foot touching the ground.”