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loss not being much heavier.
The order came quickly.
At the command ‘Forward!’—rungout in loud tones all along the line—the regiment bounded forward as one man, with the old yell that rings in my ears as I now write, and starts my old blood in fresh surges through my veins.
As the ground in our front between us and the enemy was covered with felled timber, no alignment could be kept; there was one mad rush, and but few laggards.
Our batteries opened with every gun, and with one desultory fire we carried the enemy's lines and captured over a hundred prisoners who did not know enough English to surrender.
The enemy's camps furnished the rations we failed to get in the morning, and the old regiment, with the loss of one field officer and thirty men killed and wounded, stood ready the next day to still farther tighten the cords around General Butler's lines in Bermuda Hundreds.
So ends my article, written with the hope of its meeting the eye of some old soldier of the Seventeenth, or comrades of other commands to whom it may give pleasure, and to whom the events narrated may bring up the stirring times of the past and cause their pulse to beat more quickly as the old scenes and the old comrades once more pass in review.
To the survivors of my old regiment now widely scattered, in whose faces in the providence of God I may never look again, I would like to express how much their confidence, prompt obedience in many emergencies, and their friendship and sympathy, begotten of the time, have brightened many an hour when memory has brought up again those grand old days never to be forgotten.
Arthur Herbert, Colonel Commanding Seventeenth Virginia Infantry, Army of Northern Virginia.
