"If ever I get through this war,
And a Rebel ball don't find me,
I'll shape my course by the northern star,
To the girl I left behind me."
I have said elsewhere that the regiment was not engaged on Monday. We remained all that day at the place where we bivouacked Sunday night. The ends of the staffs of our regimental flags were driven in the ground, the banners flapping idly in the breeze, while the men sat or lay around with their guns in their hands or lying by them, their cartridge-boxes buckled on, and all ready to fall in line at the tap of the drum. But for some reason that I never knew, we were not called on. Our division commander, General B. M. Prentiss, and our brigade commander, Col. Madison Miller, were both captured on Sunday with the bulk of Prentiss' division, so I reckon we were sort of "lost children." But we were not alone. There were also other regiments of Grant's command which were held in reserve and did not fire a shot on Monday.
After the battle I roamed around over the field, the most of the following two days, looking at what was to be seen. The fearful sights apparent on a bloody battlefield simply cannot be described in all their horror. They must be seen in order to be fully realized. As Byron, somewhere in "Don Juan," truly says:
"Mortality! Thou hast thy monthly bills,
Thy plagues, thy famines, thy physicians, yet tick,
Like the death-watch, within our ears the ills
Past, present, and to come; but all may yield
To the true portrait of one battlefield."
There was a small clearing on the battlefield called the "Peach Orchard" field. It was of irregular shape, and about fifteen or twenty acres in extent, as I remember. However, I cannot now be sure as to the exact size. It got its name, probably, from the fact that there were on it a few scraggy peach trees. The Union troops on Sunday had a strong line in the woods just north of the field, and the Confederates made four successive charges across this open space on our line, all of which were repulsed with frightful slaughter. I walked all over this piece of ground the day after the close of the battle, and before the dead had been buried. It is the simple truth to say that this space was literally covered with the Confederate dead, and one could have walked all over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road was somewhat lower than the adjacent ground. To men firing on their knees this afforded a slight natural breast-work, which was substantial protection. In front of this position, in addition to the large timber, was a dense growth of small under-brush, post-oak and the like, which had not yet shed their leaves, and the ground also was covered with layers of dead leaves. There was desperate fighting at this point, and during its progress exploding shells set the woods on fire. The clothing of the dead Confederates lying in these woods caught fire, and their bodies were burned to a crisp. I have read, somewhere, that some wounded men were burned to death, but I doubt that. I walked all over the ground looking at these poor fellows, and scrutinized them carefully to see the nature of their hurts and they had evidently been shot dead, or expired in a few seconds after being struck. But, in any event, the sight was horrible. I will not go into details, but leave it to your imagination.
I noticed, at other places on the field, the bodies of two Confederate soldiers, whose appearance I shall never forget. They presented a remarkable contrast of death in battle. One was a full grown man, seemingly about thirty years of age, with sandy, reddish hair, and a scrubby beard and mustache of the same color. He had been firing from behind a tree, had exposed his head, and had been struck square in the forehead by a musket ball, killed instantly, and had dropped at the foot of the tree in a heap. He was in the act of biting a cartridge when struck, his teeth were still fastened on the paper extremity, while his right hand clutched the bullet end. His teeth were long and snaggy, and discolored by tobacco juice. As just stated, he had been struck dead seemingly instantaneously. His eyes were wide open and gleaming with Satanic fury. His transition from life to death had been immediate, with the result that there was indelibly stamped on his face all the furious rage and lust of battle. He was an ill-looking fellow, and all in all was not an agreeable object to contemplate. The other was a far different case. He was lying on a sloping ridge, where the Confederates had charged a battery, and had suffered fearfully. He was a mere boy, not over eighteen, with regular features, light brown hair, blue eyes, and, generally speaking, was strikingly handsome. He had been struck on his right leg, above the knee, about mid-way the thigh, by a cannon ball, which had cut off the limb, except a small strip of skin. He was lying on his back, at full length, his right arm straight up in the air, rigid as a stake, and his fist tightly clinched. His eyes were wide open, but their expression was calm and natural. The shock and the loss of blood doubtless brought death to his relief in a short time. As I stood looking at the unfortunate boy, I thought of how some poor mother's heart would be well-nigh broken when she heard of the sad, untimely fate of her darling son. But, before the war was over, doubtless thousands of similar cases occurred in both the Union and Confederate armies.
I believe I will here speak of a notion of mine, to be considered for whatever you may think it worth. As you know, I am not a religious man, in the theological sense of the term, having never belonged to a church in my life. Have just tried, to the best of my ability, to act according to the Golden Rule, and let it go at that. But, from my earliest youth, I have had a peculiar reverence for Sunday. I hunted much with a gun when a boy, and so did the people generally of my neighborhood. Small game in that backwoods region was very plentiful, and even deer were not uncommon. Well, it was a settled conviction with us primitive people that if one went hunting on Sunday, he would not only have bad luck in that regard that day, but also all the rest of the week. So, when the Confederates began the battle on Sunday, I would keep thinking, throughout its entire progress, "You fellows started this on Sunday, and you'll get licked." I'll admit that there were a few occasions when things looked so awful bad that I became discouraged, but I quickly rallied, and my Sunday superstition—or whatever it may be called—was justified in the end. In addition to Shiloh, the battles of New Orleans in 1815, Waterloo, and Bull Run were fought on a Sunday, and in each case the attacking party was signally defeated. These results may have been mere coincidences, but I don't think so. I have read somewhere an authentic statement that President Lincoln entertained this same belief, and always was opposed to aggressive movements on Sundays by the Union troops.
The wildest possible rumors got into circulation at home, about some of the results of the battle. I have now lying before me an old letter from my father of date April 19th, in answer to mine (which I will mention later) giving him the first definite intelligence about our regiment and the neighborhood boys. Among other things he said: "We have had it here that Fry's regiment was all captured that was not killed; pretty much all given up as lost. That Beauregard had run you all down a steep place into the Tennessee river, * * * that Captain Reddish had his arm shot off, that Enoch Wallace was also wounded;"—and here followed the names of some others who (the same as Reddish and Wallace) hadn't received even a scratch. My letter to my father, mentioned above, was dated April 10, and was received by him on the 18th. It was brief, occupying only about four pages of the small, sleazy note paper that we bought in those days of the sutlers. I don't remember why I didn't write sooner, but it was probably because no mail-boat left the landing until about that time. The old mail hack ordinarily arrived at the Otter Creek post-office from the outside world an hour or so before sundown, and the evening my letter came, the