Description

50 signed and numbered prints

“We knew but little of what was going on beyond our immediate vicinity. We were in the hottest of hornet’s nests and had all we could do to attend to what was in our front whilst the sounds of a severe battle reached our ears from all directions. Bullets’ shot and shell whistled and screamed around us, wounded men came on the rear in large numbers, and the six Napoleon guns of Battery “B” hurled forth destruction in double rounds of canister as the enemy in increased numbers rushed forward to capture the guns. He seemed to be making headway against our troops in the cornfield to our left and the piece on the pike was firing in that direction. The gun was on a part of the road which sloped towards us and every time it went off it recoiled a great distance down the slope. In the midst of this pandemonium, I happened to look at this gun and notice that the cannoneers had carelessly allowed the elevating screw to run down and every time the piece was fired its elevation was increased until now its missiles were harmlessly thrown high over the heads of the enemy in its front. I yelled to the gunner to run up his elevating screw, but in the din he could not hear me.  I jumped from my horse, rapidly ran up the elevating screw until the nozzle pointed almost into the ground in front and then nodded to the gunner to pull his lanyard. The discharge carried away most of the fence in front of it and produced great destruction in the enemy’s ranks as did the subsequent discharges, and at one of these, a sergeant of the battery (Mitchell) was badly hurt by the gun running over him in its recoil. The enemy got so close to the battery in his desperate attempts to capture it, that the pieces were double-shot with canister before which whole ranks went down, and after we got possession of the field, dead men were found piled on top of each other.”