ach the breastworks. There we lost two lieutenants. A
large number of men were killed or wounded. We arrived at the other
side of the hill in great confusion. I shall never forget that horrible
scene. There were parts of several regiments all mixed up together,
entangled among fallen trees. But after getting straightened out, and
the line once more formed, the order to charge was countermanded and we
had to lay up there in that fearful hot sun all day. I was taken sick
and had to rest for awhile but I soon got better and joined the
regiment. At about 10 P.M. we were ordered down into the outer ditch of
the breastworks. We were there but a short time, when we were ordered
to the right to our old position in the rifle-pits, which we reached at
midnight.

General Payne had been wounded in the leg in the forenoon, but we could
not get up where he was to give him any aid, consequently he had to lay
there in the burning sun till night, when he was brought away in
safety. It was a scorching hot day and a number were sunstruck, some
cases proving fatal. I was exhausted and had to lie down in the shade.
It was a miserable Sunday scrape and ended like all the rest that had
been started on a Sunday, disastrously. The loss of life was very
great.

We were relieved at night by the Twenty-eighth Connecticut and returned
once more to our old camp-ground, where, after the whizzing of the
bullets and the cracking of firearms had died away, all was still but
the groans that could be heard upon the bloody battlefield.

June 15th. The day after the second assault on Port Hudson, General
Banks issued a call for volunteers "for a storming column of a thousand
men to vindicate the Flag of the Union, and the memory of its defenders
who had fallen. Let them come forward, every officer and soldier who
shares its perils and its glory shall receive a medal fit to
commemorate the first grand success of the campaign of 1863 for the
freedom of the Mississippi River. His name will be placed upon the roll
of honor." The next day, June 16, the order was promulgated and two
days later, June 18, these "stormers," as they were called, were
gathered into a camp by themselves and put into training calculated to
promote physical strength and endurance. By every conceivable way they
prepared themselves for the work that they were expected to do. These
brave men knew that all the arrangements for their support had been
made but the expected order did not com