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their inhuman and savage comrades.
No surgeon, no nurses were attending them.
They had had no water or food for one or two days, and a more horrible scene could scarcely be imagined.
Colonel Elliott set his own men to removing them to places of safety, and they were all so removed before he set fire to the depot and cars, as can be proved by hundreds.
General Beauregard states that the burning of two or more cars is not enough to make him frantic.
The exact number of the cars destroyed by Colonel Elliott is as follows:
Five cars loaded with small arms.
Five cars loaded with loose ammunition.
Five cars loaded with fixed ammunition.
Six cars loaded with officers' baggage.
Five cars loaded with clothing, subsistence stores, harness, saddles, etc.
Making a total of twenty-six cars, besides three pieces of artillery and one locomotive.
This os course does not include the depot and platform, which were filled with provisions and stores of every description.
The nine men of Colonel Elliott's command taken prisoners were a party who had taken a hand-car, and gone up the track a mile or two to destroy a water-tank.
It is presumed they were surprised by some skulkers who were afraid to approach Booneville while Colonel Elliott was there.
The charge of burning up five sick men in the depot and handing down Colonel Elliott's name to infamy, I must confess is only in character with General Beauregard's previous statements.
He knows better.
He knows it is false.
The rebellion in which he is a prominent leader must have imbued him with more credulity than reason; a spirit of malicious exaggeration has taken the place of truth.
To convict himself of inhumanity, treachery and deception in almost every word, act and deed, he has only to take the combined and concurrent testimony of thousands of his own subalterns and men, especially those who have fallen into our hands as prisoners and the large numbers who have deserted his sinking cause.
G. Granger, Brigadier-General.
