ot
"off hand," but had to fire from a "rest,"--any convenient stump, log,
or forked bush. The gun I used was a little old percussion lock rifle,
with a long barrel, carrying a bullet which weighed about sixty to the
pound. We boys had to furnish our own ammunition,--lead (which we
moulded into bullets), gun-caps, and powder. Our principal source of
revenue whereby we got money to buy ammunition was hazel-nuts, which we
would gather, shuck, and sell at five cents a quart. And the work
incident to the gathering and shucking of a quart of hazel nuts was a
decidedly tedious job. But it made us economical in the use of our
ordnance stores, so we would never throw away a shot carelessly or
unnecessarily. And it was a standing rule never to shoot a squirrel
anywhere except in the head, save as a last resort, when circumstances
compelled one to fire at some other part of the body of the little
animal. And so I thought, at the beginning of my military career, that I
should use the same care and circumspection in firing an old musket when
on the line of battle that I had exercised in hunting squirrels. But I
learned better in about the first five minutes of the battle of Shiloh.
However, in every action I was in, when the opportunity was afforded, I
took careful and deliberate aim, but many a time the surroundings were
such that the only thing to do was to hold low, and fire through the
smoke in the direction of the enemy. I will say here that the extent of
wild shooting done in battle, especially by raw troops, is astonishing,
and rather hard to understand. When we fell back to our second line at
Shiloh, I heard an incessant humming sound away up above our heads, like
the flight of a swarm of bees. In my ignorance, I at first hardly knew
what that meant, but it presently dawned on me that the noise was caused
by bullets singing through the air from twenty to a hundred feet over
our heads. And after the battle I noticed that the big trees in our
camp, just in the rear of our second line, were thickly pock-marked by
musket balls at a distance of fully a hundred feet from the ground. And
yet we were separated from the Confederates only by a little, narrow
field, and the intervening ground was perfectly level. But the fact is,
those boys were fully as green as we were, and doubtless as much
excited. The Confederate army at Shiloh was composed of soldiers the
great majority of whom went under fire there for the first time, and I
recko