John D. Billings, The history of the Tenth Massachusetts battery of light artillery in the war of the rebellion

‘We have fired the last shell, Lieutenant,’ is heard from the Fourth Detachment

‘Then give them canister!’ is the immediate response, as immediately obeyed. While in the discharge of this command, Daniel W. Atkinson, No. Two man on the Fourth Detachment gun, is shot through the lower part of the abdomen, and falls to the ground with an agonizing groan. In a few moments he is dead. Thus perished a brave soldier, a professed Christian and true man who had occupied the post of No. Two since the organization of the Battery, and who had thus sealed with his blood the cause he had upheld from the beginning with peculiar earnestness. We pause here to note further, that during the previous winter he had said he did not expect to survive the war, and in the forenoon of this particular day he had given directions to some of his more intimate comrades in regard to the disposal of his effects in case he should fall. As the troops halted from time to time, he was several times seen, apart from the column, reading the Scriptures, or on his knees in prayer. What is that somethingwhich has on so many occasions, and notably during the war, so accurately foreshadowed to the individual impending personal events, except it be a revelation from Deity? The cases of this description on record are as numerous as they are remarkable.

But no one leaves his post to minister to the dying.

When a nation's life's at hazard,
We've no time to think of men.