Bristoe Station

Northern Virginia

October 13, 1863, night

We’re in General Hill’s corps now, Heth’s division, and we’ve been marching hard all week after Meade’s army, along the railroad toward Washington. The talk is we’ve caught their rear guard strung out and can pitch into it come morning.

Men are lying down tonight with their shoes still on. When a man sleeps dressed, he’s given up on comfort.

Officers say it’ll be quick. They always say that before the long ones.

The hospital

November 6, 1863

I found my book. It has taken me better than three weeks to hold a pencil, and I am writing this with my left hand, so the letters come out like a young’un’s. I mean to set down what happened at Bristoe while I can still see it plain.

The fourteenth of October, after dinner, they formed us at the edge of some woods and sent us out across open ground toward the railroad. It looked like nothing at first. Just a long field and the railroad bank lying across it like a dark seam. That’s the trick of it.

We went quick-step, then double-quick, canteens slapping and every man breathing hard. Then the whole railroad bank lit up. Not scattered shots. Whole sheets of fire and smoke, volley after volley, and cannon tearing into us from the side where we couldn’t answer. Men didn’t stumble. They dropped, whole rows of ’em. The colors went down and came up and went down again, passing from one bloody hand to the next.

We got close. Close enough to see faces behind that bank, their mouths moving as they fired.

I was raising my rifle when it came. Not like a fist. Like a sledgehammer square on my right shoulder, and then a fire dragging across my back like somebody laid a hot iron on me and pulled. The ball went in my right shoulder, ranged clean along my back, and came out at my left shoulder. The surgeon says I’m lucky it stayed outside the ribs. I have two holes and one long misery between ’em.

I don’t remember falling. I was lying in the grass tasting dirt, my rifle gone, men running over and around me, somebody hollering “Back! Back!” I tried to get up and the world turned over.

Some of the boys dragged me back. I don’t know who. I hope to God I find out so I can thank him.

They say the regiment went in four hundred strong and came out with half that. They say it was a mistake from the start, that the Yankees were laying for us behind that bank the whole time. I don’t know about mistakes. I only know we went in a regiment and came out a remnant.

My right arm hangs like a dead limb. Some days the fever comes and some days it goes. I sleep in pieces.

Maps from the printed book