Gracious! how the driver did whip, and spur! and how the cannoneers did strain, and tug at those wheels! Captain McCarthy jumped off his horse, and put his powerful strength to the wheel. The men from the other guns joined us, and, at last, when we were nearly wild with excitement, we gave one tremendous jerk, all together, and lifted the whole thing bodily out of that rut, and over the bank. The horses, as excited now, as we were, snatched the gun over the bank, across the stream, nearly upsetting it, and then went tearing, at a full gallop, up the hill; we running at top speed to keep up. The third gun following. At this pace, we dashed into the open field, and were upon the battle ground. We ran the guns into the line of battle, along a slight work Kershaw’s men had hurriedly thrown up, just to the left of the part of the line which the Federals had taken, and were still holding. We pushed up, until we got an enfilade fire upon their lines. A few case-shots screaming down their line sent them flying out of that, and our line was restored.
The Colonel of one of their regiments, captured by our men, said that his regiment was lying down behind our captured line, and one of our shells cut down a large pine tree and threw it on his line, and about finished up what was left of his regiment. The shell burst just as it struck the tree, and the shell fragments, and falling tree together, killed twelve or fifteen men, and wounded a number of others.
The fighting was dying down now, and soon ceased. Our line restored, the enemy made no further effort to take it. The rest of the time, till dark, was taken up with sharp-shooting, and artillery fire. A farmhouse and outbuildings and barn stood right behind our position, and, I remember, the barn swallows in large numbers were skimming and twittering all around, through the sweet, bright air, while shells and balls were singing a very different sort of song. I never saw that sight during the war but this once,—birds flying about in the midst of a battle. But here, those dear little swallows circled round, and round that barn, and the adjoining field, for hours, while the air was full of flying missiles. They did not seem to mind it. Perhaps they wondered what on earth was going on. It was a curious scene!
During the night we made some little addition to the slight earth work, which the infantry had thrown up, in front of our two guns. Infantry began to pile into the line on both sides of our guns; we learned that this was the Twentieth South Carolina Regiment, Colonel Keitt, who had been killed, in a fight the Regiment had been in, that afternoon.
This regiment, at this time when some Brigades in the Army of Northern Virginia had not more than one thousand or twelve hundred men, came among us with seventeen hundred men ready for duty. The regiment had been stationed at Fort Sumter; had seen nothing of war except the siege of a Fort, and their idea of the chief duty of a soldier was,—to get as much earth between him and the enemy as possible. When they came into line this night, and saw this slight bank of dirt,—about two feet thick, and three feet high,—and learned that we expected, certainly, to fight behind it in the morning, they were perfectly aghast! They pitched in, and began to “throw dirt.” They kept it up all night, and by morning had a wall of earth in front of them, in many places eight feet high, and six to seven feet thick.
How much higher, and thicker they would have got it, if the enemy had not interrupted them, gracious only knows! Of course they couldn’t begin to shoot over it, except at the sky; perhaps they thought anything blue would do to shoot at and the sky was blue. But it was a fact, that when the enemy advanced next morning, this big regiment was positively “Hors du Combat.”
It is true, that when we woke up at daylight, and found what they had done, we jeered, and laughed at them, and showed them the impossibility of fighting from behind that wall, until some of them got ashamed, and began to shovel down the top, a little. Captain McCarthy sent to let General Kershaw know the absurd situation we were in,—supported by infantry that could not fire a shot, and warning him, that if the enemy charged, they would certainly take the line, unless our two guns alone could hold it. General Kershaw sent orders to them “to shovel that thing down to a proper height,” but they didn’t have time to do it. When the fight began some of them had cut out a shelf on the inside of the bank, and some of them had gotten boxes and logs and a number stood up on them, and did some shooting, and behaved gallantly; but many of them seeming to think that a man should be “rewarded according to his works” laid closely down behind that wall, and never stirred.
The next night General Lee took them out of the lines, and gave them picks, and shovels, and made a “sapping and mining corps” of them,—the military service they were most fitted for, and they were rewarded according to their works.
While these beavers were gallantly wielding the pick and shovel, we, satisfied with our little bank of dirt, were getting ready for next day’s work, by a good sound sleep. One of our boys did have misgiving about the strength of our defences. He went in the night, and woke up Sergeant Moncure and said, “Monkey, don’t you think these works are very thin?” “Yes, Tom, they are,” he replied. “You just get a spade, and go and make them just as thick as you think they ought to be; Good night!” He resumed his slumbers, and Tom, not an overly energetic person, walked away grumbling that “the work was too thin, but he would be derned if he was going out there, in the dark to work on them, all by himself,” which he didn’t.
Somehow when we lay down this night we had gotten the impression that things were going to be rough, in the morning. They were!