John G. B. Adams, Reminiscences of the Nineteenth Massachusetts Regiment

[68] Having no stretchers they placed me on a board, and loaded me in. This movement started my wounds bleeding again, and I thought that the words of the assistant surgeon would prove true, but they drove me a mile I should judge, and dumped me by the road side with other wounded. I remained here until the next noon. The day was fine, only very warm. All was still except an occasional picket shot. The silence was broken by one heavy gun, and the shell went whistling over us, followed by another. Then opened the heaviest cannonading ever heard on earth. Shells burst over me, and on all sides. Solid shot ploughed up the ground and I expected my time had come. Many of the wounded could crawl away, but I could not, and must stand it.

When the shelling opened nearly all of the non-combatants were at the front, and they now made the best time possible to get out of danger. I lay near a gate way, where they passed. Down would come a pack mule loaded with cooking utensils sufficient to start a stove and tin-ware store; then a lot of colored servants, or a runaway horse. I would shout and kick; was sure that I should be either killed by shell or trampled to death. Would beg some skedaddler to get another, and take me away. He would stop, look on me with pity and say he would, but before he could capture another, a shell would come along, and his place be vacant. At last I saw a staff officer whom I knew riding to the front, and called to him. He heard me, drew his sword, and drove a couple of men to me, who, finding a stretcher, had me carried to the rear of the barn, where an ambulance was found and I was placed in it. My first sergeant, Damon, had been lying near, and I urged that he be taken with me,