Robert Stiles, Four years under Marse Robert

Some weeks later, after we had reached Petersburg, in the nick of time to keep Burnside out of the town, and had taken up what promised to be a permanent position and were just dozing off into our first nap in forty-eight hours, an infantry command passing by, in the darkness, stumbled over the trail handspikes of our guns and broke out in the usual style:

“0, of course! Here's that infernal artillery again; always in the way, blocking the roads by day and tripping us up at night. What battery is this, any way?”

Some fellow, not yet clean gone in slumber, grunted out:

First Company, Richmond Howitzers.

What a change! Instantly there was a perfect chorus of greetings from the warm-hearted Texans.

“Boys, here are the Howitzers! Where's your old deaf man? Trot out your old Doctor. They're the jockeys for us. We are going to stay right here. We won't get a chance to run if these plucky Howitzer boys are with us.”

Billy tells me that he remembers, word for word, the last crisp sentence Col. Stephen D. Lee uttered the morning he complimented the old battery on the field of Frazier's Farm; that he said, “Men, hereafter when I want a battery, I'll know where to get one!” Two years later, at the base of the Bloody Angle, General Ewell seems to have been of the same opinion. He held our centre, which had just been pierced and smashed and his artillery captured. He wanted guns to stay the rout and steady his men, and he sent to the extreme left for Cabell's Battalion. I do not mean that the old battalion, or either of its batteries, was counted among the most brilliant artillery commands of the army, but I do claim that the command did have and did deserve the reputation of “staying where it was put,” and of doing its work reliably and well.

The 11th had been a sort of off-day with us, very little business doing; but the 12th made up for it. As I remember, it was yet early on the morning of the 12th that we were