able to get out with it.

It was about 12 o'clock that Capt. Lumsden sent orderly Sergeant J.
Mack Shivers on horseback to report to General Stewart that all
Confederate infantry had been driven into the fallen timber at our
front, and that it was evident the enemy would soon rush us with a
charge. That we could leave the guns and get away with all the men.

Shivers returned with the orders, "Tell Captain Lumsden it is
necessary to hold the enemy in check to the last minute regardless of
losses." This was about 12:30 p.m. They overwhelmed us about 2 p.m.

So that Lumsden's Battery alone had stopped the advance of A. J.
Smith's federal Corps for 3 hours during which Confederate troops had
been moved from right wing to a new line behind the Hillsboro pike
several hundred yards in our rear, which was all important, to the
Confederates.

Moving southward from Nashville battlefield, with the remnant of Hood's
army, Lumsden's battery was now but a name for a command of men without
arms, with a quota of horses, wagons for commissary and quartermaster's
supplies with their drivers, one half its cannoneers having been lost
at Nashville, killed wounded and prisoners.

A relation of a few happenings along this dreary march in midwinter the
roads, a loblolly of sleet and turnpike dust and grit, may serve to
show how Lumsden and his officers maintained discipline without resort
to severe or degrading punishment for lapses from duty. Like all
volunteer commands, it had in its ranks men from all conditions of life
and of various degrees of education from the collegiate down to the
illiterate man who could not write his own name. But perhaps one half
of the enlisted men or privates were graduates and had started into
professional life or had left college to give their services to their
country before the end of the university terms. They were gentlemen,
and imbued generally with the high sense of honor and devotion to duty
usual among boys and men in such social standing. They gave the general
tone to the command and the officers were careful to do all possible to
keep its moral tone and to impose no punishment that would lower the
culprit in his own estimation. They did punish by imposing extra duties
for violation of military rules, but always the individual punished as
well as all his comrades were perfectly conscious that the punishment
was deserved, and therefore necessary. For instance a private h