e great Captains of that day, Longstreet was the guiding
genius of Chickamauga. It was his masterful mind that rose equal to
the emergency, grasped and directed the storm of battle. It was by the
unparalleled courage of the troops of Hood, Humphreys, and Kershaw,
and the temporary command under Longstreet, throwing themselves
athwart the path of the great colossus of the North, that checked
him and drove him back over the mountains to the strongholds around
Chattanooga. And it is no violent assumption to say that had the
troops on the right under Polk supported the battle with as fiery zeal
as those on the left under Longstreet, the Union Army would have been
utterly destroyed and a possible different ending to the campaign, if
not in final, results might have been confidently expected.

The work of the soldier was not done with the coming of night. The
woods along the slopes where the battle had raged fiercest had caught
fire and the flames were nearing the wounded and the dead. Their calls
and piteous wails demanded immediate assistance. Soldiers in groups
and by ones and twos scoured the battlefield in front and rear,
gathering up first the wounded then the dead. The former were removed
to the field infirmaries, the latter to the new city to be built for
them--the city of the dead. The builders were already at work on
their last dwelling places, scooping out shallow graves with bayonets,
knives, and such tools that were at hand. Many pathetic spectacles
were witnessed of brother burying brother. My brother and five other
members of the company were laid side by side, wrapped only in their
blankets, in the manner of the Red Men in the legend who fought and
died here in the long, long ago. Here we left them "in all their
glory" amid the sacred stillness that now reigned over the once stormy
battlefield, where but a short while before the tread of struggling
legions, the thunder of cannon, and the roar of infantry mingled in
systematic confusion. But now the awful silence and quietude that
pervades the field after battle--where lay the dreamless sleepers of
friend and foe, victor and vanquished, the blue and the gray, with
none to sing their requiems--nothing heard save the plaintive notes of
the night bird or the faint murmurs of grief of the comrades who are
placing the sleepers in their shallow beds! But what is death to the
soldier? It is the passing of a comrade perhaps one day or hour in
advance to the river with