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"On Sabbath morning we were aroused from our
blanket couches by the booming of cannon in the direction of Pittsburg
Landing. The roar was incessant, and shook the earth. In the
interval between the discharges of artillery, the rolling of musketry
vollies
could be distinctly heard, and then were swallowed up by the renewed
thunder of the cannon. All were aware that a terrible fight was
in progress; yet the regiment was ignorant of the magnitude of
the attack, and the part they were to play in the bloody drama,
until about noon, when an order came for us to reinforce the assailed
position. Unfortunately for the Seventy-Eighth, it had not been
furnished with transportation of its own until three days before,
and then we were furnished with about forty wild mules, many of
which had never been under harness; these had to be caught and
harnessed, and the delay occasioned thereby threw our regiment
in the rear, and it did not arrive upon the battle-field until
9 o'clock that night, when we formed in battle line, and rested
upon our arms till morning, unsheltered from a furious storm of
rain. The first day's fight was now over, and almost decided
in favor of the rebels, but how they were to get over our guns
and gunboats at the Landing the next morning, was surely a puzzling
question to the rebel Generals that night.
"About 5 o'clock Sabbath afternoon our prospects
looked gloomy and dark. Forty thousand of our men had stubbornly
contested, foot by foot, the ground of a widely extended camp,
with a hundred thousand of the best armed and equipped troops
the Southern Confederacy ever sent to the field. They had fought
all day, without breakfast, dinner or supper. The enemy, who
were in sufficient numbers to relieve each other in the fight,
had feasted all day on cheese, cakes, liquors and canned fruits,
which the abandoned sutler stores furnished in great abundance.
They were flushed with their success, and had maddened themselves
by drinking the liquors they had captured, mixing it with gunpowder.
Cheer after cheer went up from their ranks. They were now about
half a mile from the river, and still pressing on. Our Generals
rode through the disordered and thin ranks of our exhausted men,
many of whom were lying on the ground too weary to move, striving
to animate and encourage them. Here our artillery saved the day.
All the batteries that had been brought off the field, and the
siege guns and heavy mortars, which | |