This text is part of:
[309]
of the works, to the left of where the Brigade had entered them.
Settling themselves in the muddy trench, the men began work, loading and firing as rapidly as possible.
Some of them were too much exhausted to stand up. These sat down on the edge of the trench and loaded guns for the other men to fire.
Two or three were sometimes kept busy loading guns which one man would fire.
The smoke hung in a dense cloud all about as the air was too heavy to permit it to rise.
At one time during the fighting at this point Captain J. G. B. Adams struck up the inspiring song, ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom.’
It was taken up by the singers of the Nineteenth and other regiments and made to echo over the hills amid the rattle of musketry.
Once in a while the fire slackened and then broke out with renewed vigor as the rebels endeavored to retake their works.
Ammunition and hard bread was brought up by pack mules and opened in the rear of the line, the men helping themselves to each.
The scene was one to be remembered.
The ditch which had been dug in throwing up the works was crowded with men from different states, belonging to two or three different corps, soaked with rain, their faces so begrimmed with powder as to be almost unrecognizable; some standing ankle deep in the red mud, firing, while the edge of the ditch was lined with others sitting and loading as fast as possible and munching hard bread, the crumbs of which were scattered around their smutty mouths and besprinkled their beards.
The mud in the ditch was so thick and clung to the boots in such heavy masses that it was difficult to move about.
The men's right shoulders were thickly plastered with it from the butts of their muskets.
There was a battery in action near the Landron house which sent shells over their heads, so near as to keep the men in mortal dread.
Soon a relieving line came in and the men fell back.
Just then a shell came over, struck and exploded just where they had been standing.
The rebel works were well made; on the inner side traverses were built at short intervals for protection from cross fires,—the spaces between these were called by the men ‘Horse-stalls.’
A dozen or more men could crowd into each space.
The point
Salem Press. Co., Salem, Ma., 1906.
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.