nd we knew that the folks at
home would hear it, I am free to say, that we would _not_ have "taken a
penny for our thoughts."

=Contrast in Losses and the Reasons Therefor=

The fight was over, just about as dusk was closing in. In this, and the
fight at five o'clock, the enemy lost about six thousand men, killed and
wounded. In the assaults, at _ten_, _eleven_ and at _three_ o'clock,
they certainly lost between two and three thousand in killed and
wounded, so this day's work cost them about seven or eight thousand in
killed and wounded, besides prisoners.

Our loss was very small. On our immediate part of the line, almost
nothing. In the battery, we had one man wounded at five o'clock. In this
furious close up fight with infantry, with the awful mauling our guns
gave them, strange to say, we had not a man touched. The only blood shed
that day, at the "4th" gun, was caused by that rail striking my hand.
And our battle line was just as it was, in the morning, save for the
hecatomb of dead and dying in front of it, and six hundred prisoners we
held inside.

About these prisoners: Numbers of these men were drunk, and officers
too. One Colonel was so drunk that he did not know he was captured, or
what had happened. The explanation of this fact, I do not profess to
know, but _this_ was what _the men themselves told us_, "That before they
charged, heavy rations of whiskey were issued, and the men made to drink
it. I know that indignant denial has been made of this charge, that the
Federal soldiers were _made drunk_ to send them in, but _this_ I do
_certainly know_, as an eye witness, and hundreds of our men know it
too, that here, on the Spottsylvania line, and at Cold Harbor, and other
times in this campaign, we captured numbers of the men, assaulting our
lines, who were very drunk, and said they were made to drink. And this
fact is one reason for the carnage among them, and the light loss they
inflicted upon us. It made their men shoot wildly, and the moment our
men saw this, they could, with the cooler aim, send death into their
ranks. These hundreds of men going, _drunk_, to face death was a
horrible sight; it is a horrible thought, but _it was a fact_.

=Why Captain Hunter Failed to Rally His Men=

In the quiet time, just before that sudden rush which swept over the
works, Captain Hunter, of the Texans, was frying some pieces of fat
bacon in a frying pan, over a little fire just by our gun. In a flash,
the enemy w