The horror of the situation flashed on us. The enemy would be bayonetting our sleeping, helpless comrades, and the line be taken in two minutes! What could we do to save them? Wake them up? No time to get a dozen men roused up before the fatal peril would be upon us. Suddenly! the same thought seemed to flash into our minds. Fire the gun! that will wake up the line instantly. Come boys! There was a case-shot in the gun. I remembered I had not fired it out, and I had my friction primer box on, and a primer hooked to the lanyard. We jerked the trail loose from the limber, and let the gun run to its place! Before it stopped, I think, I had the primer in, while Dan pulled the trail round to get the aim. He sprung aside as I let drive.
The crash of that Napoleon, and the scream of the shell there, in the deep stillness of day-dawn, sounded as if it might be heard all over Virginia! The effect was instant! You ought to have seen the boys, lying all about, “tumble up.” They flirted up from the ground like snap bugs! “Gabriel’s trumpet” couldn’t have jerked them to their feet quicker.
Ned Barnes had lain down right where the gun had been, at the work. When we ran it back to its place, in our excitement, we did not notice him. Fortunately the wheels went on either side of him. He was lying flat on his back, and right under the gun, when it fired. Ned went on like a chicken with its head off. There was a scuffle, a yell, the whack of a bumped head under the gun. Ned came tumbling out, all in a heap, perfectly dazed, and wanting to know, in indignant tones, “What in the thunder we were doing that way for?”
Before the sound of our gun had died away the whole line was up, shooting like mad, and both guns were going hard. A few minutes of this sent that sneaking line back to the woods, with a good deal more noise, and faster, than it came. We learnt, afterwards, that the idea was to surprise us, if possible. If so, to take, and sweep our line. If not, not to press the attack. The “surprise” was all they could have wished. Not a picket fired on them. They were in one hundred and fifty yards of our sleeping men, and could have simply walked over them, and captured the whole line at that point. And, if they had—fixed as our Army was, a half hour later—it would, I am sure, have meant disaster. The only thing that averted it was, humanly speaking, the accident that three young “Howitzers” sat up talking all night, and, happened to look over at that wood at the break of day,—and had a cannon handy!
I think the Texans “owed us another one” for this, and the Army of Northern Virginia “owed us one” too. Major-General Field said so in his report of this incident.
The very same thing which would have happened here was happening five minutes later up the line to our right, where the Federal troops came right over our works, and caught our exhausted soldiers asleep in their blankets—the start of the bloody business of the Bloody Angle.
Yes! the bloody work which was to go on all day long, this dreadful 12th of May, was already beginning, up there in the woods.
The little firing on our part of the line was scarcely over, before we heard the sound of musketry come rolling down the line from the right. Soon the big guns joined in, and we knew that a furious fight was going on, off there. In a few moments we got the news, called from man to man down along the lines, “The Yankees have taken the Salient on Ewell’s front, and captured Ed. Johnson’s Division, and twenty guns. Pass it down the lines!”
So it was! In overwhelming masses the Federals had poured out of the woods, over the Salient Angle, where the men were asleep, and from which the cannon had been withdrawn. And General Lee was trying to drive them out, and retake our works.
This was the great business of the 12th of May. A very cyclone of battle raged round that Salient. The Federals trying to hold it, our men trying to retake it. We heard that the two Parrott guns of our “Right Section” had gone over there to help, and they were in the thick of that awful row. We heard it all going on, artillery and musketry, rolling and crashing away, all day long.