We arrived at the hospital just before night and I proceeded to make my patients as comfortable as possible. There were at this place 120 wounded Union soldiers besides several hundred wounded Confederates. Our quarters were the open air. These wounded men lay scattered all around, in the garden, the orchard, by the roadside, any and every where.
The first night here I sat up all night building fires, carrying water for the wounded and dressing their wounds. Besides myself, there was a surgeon of an Illinois Battery and James Fadden, of the 10th Wis., who had a scalp wound, to care for these poor men, and a busy time we had. I assisted the surgeon in performing amputations, besides my other duties.
The rebels seemed to think we could live without food as they issued but three days rations to us in eleven days.
How did we live? I will tell you. On both sides of us was a corn field but the rebels had picked all the corn but we skirmished around and found an occasional nubbin which we boiled, then shaved off with a knife, making the product into mush. Besides this, we found a few small pumpkins and some elder berries, these we stewed and divided among the men.
About a week after we arrived here, I applied to the rebel surgeon in charge for permission to kill some of the cattle, which were running at large, telling him that our men were starving. He replied that he could do nothing for us, that he had not enough rations for his own men, that he could not give me permission to kill cattle, as Gen. Bragg had issued orders just before the battle authorizing citizens to shoot any soldier, Reb or Yank, whom they found foraging. But he added that he would not “give me away” if I killed one. I took the hint, and hunting up an Enfield rifle the Union surgeon and I started out for beef. We went into the corn field to the east of us where there were quite a number of cattle, and selecting a nice fat three-year-old heifer, I told the doctor that I was going to shoot it. He urged me not to shoot so large an animal as the citizens would shoot us for it, and wanted me to kill a yearling near by. I told him “we might just as well die for an old sheep as a lamb,” and fired, killing the three-year-old. You ought to have seen us run after I fired. Great Scott! How we skedaddled. Pell mell we went, out of the corn field, over the fence, and into the brush. There we lay and watched in the direction of two houses, but seeing no person after a while we went back to our game. It did not take long to dress that animal and taking a quarter we carried it back to the hospital. We secured the whole carcass without molestation and then proceeded to give our boys a feast. We ate the last of it for breakfast the next morning. After this feast came another famine. I tried once more to find a beef, but found instead two reb citizens armed with shot guns. I struck out for tall timber. Citizens gave me chase but I eluded them by dodging into the canebrakes which bordered the creek, thence into the creek down which I waded, finally getting back to the hospital minus my gun.
You may be sure that I did not try hunting after this little episode.
Rosecrans and Bragg had just before this made arrangements for the exchange of wounded prisoners. Our hospitals were at the Cloud Farm, five miles north-west from us, and Crawfish Springs, five miles south of Cloud Farm.
The next morning I secured an old rattle-bones of a horse and went over to the Cloud Farm for rations. I reported to the Provost Marshal on Gen. Bragg’s staff, and not being able to procure any rations here, he sent a cavalryman with me as a safe guard. We went down to Crawfish Springs, where I procured a sack full of hard tack and returned to the hospital.
I traveled fifteen miles that day over the battlefield. Such a sight as I there saw I hope never to see again. This was eleven days after the battle and none of our dead had been buried then; in fact, the most of our brave men who fell at Chickamauga were not buried until after the battle of Missionary Ridge and the country had come in possession of the Union forces. The sight was horrible. There they lay, those dead heroes, just as they fell when stricken with whistling bullet, or screaming canister, or crashing shell.
Some of them had been stripped of their clothing, all were badly decomposed. The stench was beyond my power to tell, or yours to imagine. Taken all together it was the most horrible scene the eye of man ever rested upon.