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The rebel loss is estimated at headquarters at about two thousand five hundred or three thousand, and the estimate can well be accepted when the fact I have given above is recalled.
One hundred and fifty prisoners were taken, and none lost.
Our loss is set down at about four hundred and eighty, in the two commands of Logan and Dodge; the exact number in the Fifteenth corps was two hundred and thirty-eight.
The figures given above include, on both sides, the killed and wounded and captured, and on our side also, the trivial losses by skirmishing on the two subsequent days.
Among the commissioned officers killed on our side were Colonel Dickerman, of the One Hundred and Third Illinois, Major Geisy, of the Forty-sixth Ohio, and Lieutenant Lovell, of the Twenty-seventh Ohio.
The body of Major Geisy has been embalmed, and sent home to his friends.
Captain Congers, of the Sixty-fourth Illinois, and Captain McRae, Sixty-sixth Indiana, were severely wounded.
On the morning of the thirtieth, also, a stray shot from a skirmisher slightly grazed General Logan on the left arm, and entered the right breast of Colonel Taylor, chief of artillery to General McPherson, inflicting a very painful wound, though it is thought he will recover.
There have thus occurred, since the opening of the campaign south of the Etowah River, up to the evening of the twenty-eighth, three separate affairs which approached almost to the dignity of battles.
On the afternoon of the twenty-fifth the enemy attempted to resist the advance of Hooker in the centre; on the twenty-seventh they attempted to turn the left flank, under General Wood, and on the twenty-eighth, to turn the right, under McPherson.
An honest statement of the facts compels the acknowledgment, that in the first they succeeded substantially, though the affair wore a sufficiently brilliant aspect from our having carried the first slight line of works, and carried on the pursuit with so much elan, till we were rudely halted by the artillery and heavier forces of the second.
Our losses, too, here, being the attacking party, and encountering a severe discharge of canister, with none to answer it, was, doubtless, heavier than that of the enemy.
So in the second.
Here we had little available artillery, and met a formidable fire from every species of arms.
It cost us a heavy loss, but it was imperatively necessary to stop the enemy's advance.
But in the action on the right it was better.
The results were equally good, while the losses were far lighter, and the enemy suffered in an inverse ratio.
Not that the troops were any braver on the right, or the fighting any better, for they were not, nor could they be, but they fought on the defensive.
May 29.
After having remained in position before the enemy three days, and tested pretty thoroughly his strength and disposition, and ascertained that the passes were too strongly fortified to be carried without an unnecessary loss of life, the determination seems to have been formed to march the whole line of battle by the left flank, and then, by a sudden massing of troops, to effect a passage by certain roads in that quarter, yet undefined.
This plan was to have been carried out quietly and secretly during the night of this day. But, in some way, the rebels were informed of the design, or at least strongly suspected it, and succeeded in postponing its execution.
This they did by noisy and buncombe attacks with artillery and musketry upon the right centre and right, which they made at frequent intervals during the night, and with so much apparent fury and purpose that our Generals deemed it unwise to attempt the movement.
It is an axiom of war that a flank march in front of the enemy is the most dangerous that a commander is called upon to make, and should always be covered with the utmost secrecy.
Though the enemy's fire was necessarily aimless and vain in the darkness of the dense forests, still it was not known to what it might lead; and as it showed that our plan was discovered, the men lay quiet in their works, and allowed the skirmishers and the cannon to make reply.
And reply they did, with a mighty emphasis.
Five or six batteries of thunderers gave forth into the still midnight air of Georgia such sounds as they were little wont to hear, and as their deep voices rever-berated, far and wide, through the forests, they admonished the impudent rebels, in tones which were not to be mistaken, of the potency of the monster they had awakened from his slumbers.
As we lay that night, on our sleepless beds of leaves, while an occasional Minie sputtered through the leaves overhead, and the loud bellowing of the cannon made the whole air quake, we had a slight earnest of “the pride, the pomp, the circumstance of glorious war.”
The result of all this noise and fury was, as might have been expected, very slight, twenty men wounded on our side, and probably a greater number on the other.
The attack on McPherson's line was equally impudent and empty.
It was repeated three several times, and caused a loss equally trivial with our own.May 30.
The last night's work had disarranged the plans for this day, and there must be new consultations, new drawing of lines on the maps, new calculations of chances and balancing of probabilities; and, meantime, the great army lies quiet, and the day is distinguished for nothing, except the endless skirmishing and picket-firing.
Will they never have done with that popping and peppering of guns?
Are our ears made of leather, and our nerves of tanned leather?
Besides all that, there is great danger that somebody will get hit.
To-morrow will, no doubt, “usher in great events.”
They can not long be delayed.