This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[272]
“Yes, I do,” said I; “I have heard nothing but the account of men who seem to have been frightened almost to death.
I don't believe you were.”
“But I was, General, yet I think I can tell you what I saw. I cannot tell you anything about the two regiments shooting at each other going up, because I was not there at that time; I was with Duryea's regiment.
Well, we took Little Bethel, and that was not anything to take; the rebels had run away.
Then we marched up into the woods to support Greble's battery, and we remained there a while.
As we came up to the woods the enemy began to fire at us and the balls at first went over our heads into the trees.
Well, we could have stood that, but, General, they fired ‘rotten balls.’
”
“You mean shells, I suppose?”
“Well, yes; that is what they told me afterwards they were; but they would strike a tree and burst, and the pieces would drop around among us. I guess if they had been regular balls the men would have stood it, but they broke and scattered to the woods.
It seemed as if they might as well scatter as anyway; because there was nobody came out of the fort at us.”
“Well,” said I, “I am glad to see a man who got near enough to see what the fort was.”
“It was a very large fort, I should think some thirteen feet high, and they had mounted on it some fifteen or twenty guns.
There was a ditch in the front, and if we had got up to it it would have been impossible for us to have climbed up so as to get in it.”
“Do you know anybody that got nearer to it than you?”
“No; there were some as near.
But Winthrop went clear up farther than any of us, and then he. went back to the main body of the troops.”
That was the least exaggerated report that I got of the fort.
Some reported as many as thirty guns.
As a matter of fact, there were three six-pounder field-pieces, and the fortification was so low that they had to dig an excavation to let the wheels down so as to bring the top of the parapet above the top of the gun carriages so as to protect them from our fire.
Afterwards I rode my horse at full trot over those thirteen feet high parapets.
I sent quite early in the evening to have George Scott, who was to have a “shooting iron” and accompany Winthrop, and found him
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.