aged on Monday. We
remained all that day at the place where we bivouacked Sunday night. The
ends of the staffs of our regimental flags were driven in the ground,
the banners flapping idly in the breeze, while the men sat or lay around
with their guns in their hands or lying by them, their cartridge-boxes
buckled on, and all ready to fall in line at the tap of the drum. But
for some reason that I never knew, we were not called on. Our division
commander, General B. M. Prentiss, and our brigade commander, Col.
Madison Miller, were both captured on Sunday with the bulk of Prentiss'
division, so I reckon we were sort of "lost children." But we were not
alone. There were also other regiments of Grant's command which were
held in reserve and did not fire a shot on Monday.

After the battle I roamed around over the field, the most of the
following two days, looking at what was to be seen. The fearful sights
apparent on a bloody battlefield simply cannot be described in all their
horror. They must be seen in order to be fully realized. As Byron,
somewhere in "Don Juan," truly says:

"Mortality! Thou hast thy monthly bills,
Thy plagues, thy famines, thy physicians, yet tick,
Like the death-watch, within our ears the ills
Past, present, and to come; but all may yield
To the true portrait of one battlefield."

There was a small clearing on the battlefield called the "Peach Orchard"
field. It was of irregular shape, and about fifteen or twenty acres in
extent, as I remember. However, I cannot now be sure as to the exact
size. It got its name, probably, from the fact that there were on it a
few scraggy peach trees. The Union troops on Sunday had a strong line in
the woods just north of the field, and the Confederates made four
successive charges across this open space on our line, all of which were
repulsed with frightful slaughter. I walked all over this piece of
ground the day after the close of the battle, and before the dead had
been buried. It is the simple truth to say that this space was literally
covered with the Confederate dead, and one could have walked all over it
on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in
his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard
field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle.
Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that
ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running