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[42] Millroy from crossing to attack the entrenchments, the battle culminated into an artillery duel of three hours duration, when the enemy fell back. During this artillery duel the writer witnessed as cool a piece of daring as he saw but once after during the war. He was lying down in his place in the trench at the extreme point, near the enemy's battery and directly beneath our own, in line of the direct fire. The next man to to the left of him was private Robert Blackburn, the present postmaster of Antioch, Va., who was sitting up, a twelve pound shell fell in the trench between us, its firing, hissing fuse rapidly burning, predicating death or wounds to all in that part of the trench. There was no time for me to rise and throw it out, so I exclaimed, as it fell: ‘Throw her out, Bob.’ Instantly he seized it and hurled it over the bank of trench, and it scarcely rolled twenty feet before it exploded. Here was a fair specimen of our demoralization, so curtly mentioned in Mrs. Lee's history. Indeed, Colonel (afterward General) Edward Johnson paid the men the compliment to say, ‘They were as immobile under fire as a parcel of tarrapins on a sandbar.’
Richmond, VA. 1899.
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