in had met their death from the canister of the
Eleventh. The Brigade Commander's report states that the battery fired
with great rapidity and extraordinary accuracy.

The battery entered the fight with ninety-seven men and five officers,
commissioned and acting. Of these, eighteen were killed and thirty-nine
wounded, many mortally. A number of the wounded had been bayoneted at
their guns. Of the cannoneers alone, forty-six were killed or wounded.
Forty-six out of a total of fifty-four. More than five men out of every
six.

The statistics compiled by Col. Fox in his "Regimental Losses in the
American Civil War," show that this day's record in killed and mortally
wounded equaled, within one, the total killed in any light battery
during its entire term of service. This work also states that the losses
of the Eleventh at Iuka were 22% greater than those sustained by any
other light battery in any one engagement during the war.

You have been familiar with death and wounds and the aching pain of deep
sympathy for suffering comrades. Therefore I will not depict the
tortures and individual heroisms of those artillerymen who fell, to die
or partly recover. Those who died left a legacy of glory and honor to
posterity and to their country. That legacy is of greater value than the
greatest riches, for it will always endure, and the martyrs of the civil
war, the dead and the living, will proudly bear to the throne of God
those scars which were the price of their country's salvation.

One singular feature of this fight was that but two members of the
battery were taken prisoners. The guns were captured and recaptured
several times before dark. The battery men had never abandoned them
voluntarily. One Confederate prisoner afterward said:

"Those battery boys had so much spunk that we took pity on a few
who were left."

It may have been this respect for the courage of the artillerymen which
induced the Confederates to let the few survivors go. But could they
have looked into the future and seen these same men and guns at Corinth
only fourteen days later, they would probably have dropped every other
work and secured them while they had this one chance.

After attending to the wounded, the night after the fight at Iuka, all
members of the battery were ordered to a rendezvous. They were all
assembled by 5 A. M. and, after reverently burying our dead, the men
turned their attention to securing the guns and equipments s