ily and saw
him pitch the two flags over the breastwork. I presume that the men inside
the work who got possession of the flags were afterwards sent to
Washington with them and possibly may have received medals for their
capture. I felt so uneasy while outside, lest the rebels should make some
movement that would start our line to firing again that I kept close to
the breastwork, and as it was soon manifest that the chance in the
darkness of finding a friend, where the bodies were so many, was too
remote to justify the risk I was taking, I returned within our line.

From what I saw while outside I have always believed that General Hood
never stated his losses fully. Those losses were in some respects without
precedent in either army on any other battle-field of the war. He had five
generals killed, six wounded and one captured on our breastworks, and the
slaughter of field and company officers, as well as of the rank and file,
was correspondingly frightful. It was officially reported of Quarles's
brigade that the ranking officer in the entire brigade at the close of the
battle was a captain. Of the nine divisions of infantry composing Hood's
army, seven divisions got up in time to take part in the assault and at
least six of these seven divisions were as badly wrecked as was Pickett's
division in its famous charge at Gettysburg.

Our loss was officially stated as two thousand, three hundred, twenty-six
men and almost the whole of it was due to the presence of the two brigades
in front of the main line. Casement's brigade, to the left of Reilly's,
sustained a very determined assault which was repulsed with a loss of only
three killed and sixteen wounded. But the action of Casement's men was not
hampered by the presence of any of Wagner's men in their front and they
could open fire as soon as the rebels came within range. If the brigades
of Reilly and Strickland could have opened fire under the same conditions
they would have done just as well as Casement's brigade. A critical
investigation of our losses will conclusively demonstrate that at Franklin
the violation of the military axiom never to post a small body of troops
in a way to hamper the action of the main body was directly responsible
for the unnecessary loss of more than two thousand of our soldiers. That
was the frightful butchers' bill our army had to pay for a bit of
incompetent generalship.

How was it possible for veteran generals of the Atlanta campaign to