n, the next.
Closer and closer to our guns they pressed their bloody way, until they
were within fifty yards of us. Heavens! how those men did strive, and
strain to make their way against that tempest of bullets and canister!
It was too much for man to do! They stopped and stayed there, and fired
and shouted, under our withering fire. The carnage was fearful. Their
men were being butchered! Their lines had all fallen into utter
confusion. They could not come on! Despair suddenly seized them! The
next moment a panic stricken cloud of fugitives was fast vanishing from
our view, and the ground over which they had charged was blue with
corpses, and red with blood.

=Eggleston's Heroic Death=

Just here, we of the "Howitzer" suffered our first, and only, loss in
this day's fighting. Cary Eggleston, "No. 1" at third gun, had his arm
shattered, and almost cut away from his body, by a fragment of shell. He
quietly handed his rammer to John Ayres, who that instant came up to the
gun, and said, "Here Johnny, you take it and go ahead!" Then, gripping
his arm with his other hand, partly to stop the fast flowing blood, he
turned to his comrades, and said in his jocular way, "Boys, I can never
handle a sponge-staff any more. I reckon I'll have to go to teaching
school." Then he stood a while, looking at the men working the gun. They
urged him to go to the rear; he would not for a while. When he consented
to go, they wanted to send a man with him, but he refused, and walked
off by himself. As he passed back an infantry officer, seeing what an
awful wound he had, and the streaming blood, insisted that one of the
men should go and help him to the hospital. "No," he said; "I'm all
right, and you haven't got any men to spare from here." So, holding his
own arm, and compressing the artery with his thumb, he got to the
hospital.

His arm was amputated, and a few days after, as the battery passed
through Spottsylvania Court House, we went by the Court House building,
used as a hospital, where he lay on the floor, and bade him "good-bye."
He was just as cheerful, and bright, as ever, and full of eager interest
in all that was going on. Said "Since he had time to think about it, he
believed he _could_ handle a sponge-staff _with one hand_; was going to
practice it soon as he could get up, and would be back at his post
_before long_." The next day, the brave young fellow died. The
"Howitzers" will always remember him tenderly. No braver, coo