With Fire and Sword. S. H. M. Byers
enemy—enemy no longer. Our grape shot had torn whole companies of men to pieces. They lay in heaps of dozens, even close up to the works. General Rogers, who had led a brigade into the hopeless pit, lay on his back, dead, with his flag in his hand. He was the fifth one to die carrying that flag. When I reached him some cruel one had stripped him of his boots. Another had taken his fine gold watch.
In this attack on Corinth the brave Southerners lost 5000 wounded, and we buried 1423 of their dead on the battlefield. Our own loss had been 2200 dead and wounded. That night I stood guard under an oak tree on the battlefield among the unburied dead. Many of the wounded, even, had not yet been gathered up. The moon shone as brightly as the night before, while thousands who had lain there under its peaceful rays before the battle were now again sleeping, but never to waken.
Our regiment now pursued the flying Rebels with great vigor. The quantities of broken batteries, wagons, tents, knapsacks, guns, etc., strewn along the roads behind them were immense. At the Hatchie River the Rebels were momentarily headed off by a division under Hurlbut that had hurried across from Bolivar. A seven hours' battle was fought at the bridge, but the Rebels got away in another direction. Possibly the best friend I had in the world, save my kin, was killed at that bridge. It was Lieutenant William Dodd, a classmate in school. His head was shot off by a cannonball just as his regiment was charging at the bridge.
The pursuit of the enemy was being pushed with vigor when the army was ordered to desist and return to camp. It was an astounding order, as it was in our power to destroy the defeated and flying columns. That order was one of the mistakes of Grant's earlier days as a commander. Indeed, we of the rank and file had little confidence in Grant in those days. We reflected that at Shiloh he was miles away from the battlefield at the critical moment. Sherman had saved the Union army from destruction there. At Iuka, Grant, though commander, did not even know a battle was going on. At Corinth he was forty miles away, and now, when we had the enemy almost within our grasp, he suddenly called us back. Rosecrans protested. It was in vain. The order, more imperative than before, was repeated. It required months, and great events, to make Grant the hero of the army which he afterward became.
This entry I find in my diary in one of those days: "Our commander of the district is General U. S. Grant, who took Donelson; but aside from that one hour's fighting, and a little fighting at Shiloh, the troops know little about him. Rosecrans is at present the hero of this army, and, with him leading it, the boys would storm Hades."
With the mercury at one hundred, the dust in the roads ankle deep, and the whole atmosphere yellow and full of it, the regiments exhausted by the pursuit, and yet disgusted at our recall, slowly tramped their way back to Corinth. Now I visited my wounded companions in the hospital. On inquiry for certain ones I learned that they were dead and lying out in the improvised graveyard near by.
For some reason the dead at Hatchie Bridge were not buried. A week after the battle my brother rode by there on a cavalry expedition and made the horrible discovery that hogs were eating up the bodies of our dead heroes. That too was war.
We now camped on the edge of the town and went on building still other and greater forts. Many of the soldiers made huts for themselves. It was getting cooler now, and little fireplaces were built in the huts and tents. Brick was scarce, and in a few instances the men used the stone slabs from a graveyard close at hand. It seemed vandalism, but the dead did not need them and the living did.
CHAPTER IV
An unlucky campaign led by General Grant—Holly Springs burned up—The first foragers—Some modern Falstaffs—Counting dead men.
In a month's time, or by November 2, 1862, the army, reorganized, our division led by Quimby, and Grant in command of the whole force, started on that very first disastrous campaign for the rear of Vicksburg. Grant had some thirty thousand soldiers to march with him by way of Grand Junction and Holly Springs, and another thirty thousand men, under Sherman, he sent down the Mississippi River to attack Vicksburg from another direction. We marched in mud and wind and rain till nearly Christmas, the enemy constantly retreating before us. We made a tremendous supply station at Holly Springs and left it in charge of a garrison. There were supplies there for a hundred thousand men, besides a million dollars' worth of captured cotton.
Just as we were confident of overtaking and destroying the enemy, we were stunned by the tidings that a great column of Rebel cavalry had dashed in behind our army. With torches and firebrands they had burned Holly Springs to the ground, and had destroyed all the army stores. There was not a potato or cracker or a pound of bacon left. How I remember that dark night when Van Dorn's cavalry got behind us in the country lanes of Mississippi! I had been started back to a hospital in Holly Springs, for my eyes had been inflamed for days. Just as my little freight train reached the suburb of what had been the town, the rear guard of the enemy rode out at the other side. The morning that I arrived there was nothing there but smoke, and ashes, and ruins, and a smell of coal oil over all. A million dollars' worth of our army supplies had been burned up in a night. The pretty town, too, was in ashes, and Van Dorn's bold cavalry swung their sabers in the air and rode away laughing. General Grant's father and mother, in the town at the time on their way to visit their illustrious son with the advance of the army, were captured, but politely paroled and left among the ruins.
The loss of the town was a disgrace to the North. There was a fort there, solidly built of cotton bales and occupied by a colonel and a thousand troops. The colonel forgot what our ancestors did with cotton bales at New Orleans, and promptly threw up the sponge. But then Colonel Murphy was not General Jackson. With the loss of Holly Springs and the destruction of our base of supplies there was nothing for that whole army of Grant's to do but to trudge its weary way back to Corinth and Memphis, through the mud and the wind and the rain.
The tragical part of that campaign was taking place at the same moment down by the Yazoo River, right under the guns of Vicksburg. Grant, when he marched out of Memphis, had sent Sherman and thirty thousand men down the river in steamboats to attack Vicksburg from one side while he should hurry along with another thirty thousand men and pound it from the other side. Sherman and his heroes made the awful assaults at Chickasaw bayou we read of, never dreaming of the fiasco that had befallen the main army at Holly Springs. Not one word of the news ever reached him—and then in swamps and bayous his soldiers waded in water halfway to their necks and assaulted impregnable hills and breastworks. Two thousand men were killed or mangled to no purpose. Some of the heroic fighting of the war was done in that Yazoo slaughter pen, and then Sherman and his crippled army withdrew in utter failure.
Vicksburg was safe for awhile.
My own duty in that unlucky campaign with Grant had been to search the country in the neighborhood of our camps and bivouacs for additional supplies. Many a time, with a dozen or twenty men for guards, and a couple of six-mule teams, we would venture miles from camp to confiscate bacon, flour, poultry, or whatever else a soldier could eat. On my return to the regiment with a wagon full of good things, the companies would set up a cheer for the quartermaster sergeant. The colonel always allowed me to choose the guards who should accompany me. Many a time our little squad got back to camp by the skin of their teeth, chased by guerrillas or some wandering band of Rebel cavalry. Our habit was, when we found a plantation with something to spare on it, to post sentinels in the lanes in every direction, while a few of us with the aid of the negroes loaded the wagons. If all went well, the procession, followed by the slaves we freed and took with us, went back to camp in state. Sometimes there was indecorous haste in getting home, owing to our sentinel firing his gun in warning of near danger. More than one of the boys of those venturous excursions, to this day, have not yet come back to camp.
On one of these excursions one day we were surprised by a little party of rangers, but we took their leader captive, and with him a fine Kentucky charger and a splendid rifle. The brigade colonel presented to me the rifle I myself had captured, for my "bravery," he said, but the splendid thoroughbred he took for himself. Alas! this rifle, the testimonial of my adventure, was burned up when the Rebel cavalry took Holly Springs. I had left