Robert Stiles, Four years under Marse Robert

[253] standing by our guns talking, when a twenty-pounder Parrott shell came grazing just over our guns, passed on, and about forty yards behind us struck a pine tree about two and a half to three feet in diameter. The shell had turned. It struck that big tree sideways and cut it entirely off, and threw it from the stump. It fell in an upright position, struck the ground, stood for an instant and then came crashing down. It was a very creepy suggestion of what that shell might have done to one of us. A few moments after, another struck the ground right by us and ricochetted. After it passed us, as was frequently the case, we caught sight of it and followed its upward flight until it seemed to be going straight to the sky.

Stiles said, “There it goes, as though flung by the hand of a giant.” Beau Barnes, who was not poetical, exclaimed, “Giant be darned; there ain't any giant can fling 'em like that!” He was right!

If the foregoing was not written with malicious intent to expose me to the scorn of all sensible and practical people, then my belief is that Willy Dame dreamed the absurd story; but if Barnes and I did speak under the circumstances mentioned, and both are correctly quoted, then I admit the redoubtable “Beau” had decidedly the best of it, and I apologize humbly.

The 10th of May, 1864, was preeminently a day of battle with the Army of Northern Virginia. I know, of course, that the 12th is commonly regarded as the pivotal day, the great day, and the Bloody Angle as the pivotal place, the great place, of the Spottsylvania fights, and that for an hour or so, along the sides and base of that angle, the musketry fire is said to have been heavier than it ever was at any other place in all the world, or for any other hour in all the tide of time. But for frequency and pertinacity of attack, and repetition and constancy of repulse, I question if the left of General Lee's line on the 10th of May, 1864, has ever been surpassed. I cannot pretend to identify the separate attacks or to distinguish between them, but should think there must have been at least a dozen of them. One marked feature was that, while fresh troops poured to almost every charge, the same muskets in the hands of the same men met the first attack in the morning and the last at night; and so it was that the men who in the early morning were so full of fight and fun that they leaped upon the breastworks and