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A Ride With A Mad Horse In A Freight-Car 1898 By: W. H. H. (William Henry Harrison) Murray (1840-1904) |
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By W. H. H. Murray Copyright, 1898, by William Henry Harrison Murray
It was at the battle of Malvern Hill a battle where the carnage
was more frightful, as it seems to me, than in any this side of the
Alleghanies during the whole war that my story must begin. I was then
serving as Major in the th Massachusetts Regiment the old th, as we
used to call it and a bloody time the boys had of it too. About 2 p. m.
we had been sent out to skirmish along the edge of the wood in which,
as our generals suspected, the Rebs lay massing for a charge across
the slope, upon the crest of which our army was posted. We had barely
entered the underbrush when we met the heavy formations of Magruder in
the very act of charging. Of course, our thin line of skirmishers was no
impediment to those onrushing masses. They were on us and over us before
we could get out of the way. I do not think that half of those running,
screaming masses of men ever knew that they had passed over the remnants
of as plucky a regiment as ever came out of the old Bay State. But many
of the boys had good reason to remember that afternoon at the base of
Malvern Hill, and I among the number; for when the last line of Rebs
had passed over me, I was left among the bushes with the breath nearly
trampled out of me and an ugly bayonet gash through my thigh; and mighty
little consolation was it for me at that moment to see the fellow who
ran me through lying stark dead at my side, with a bullet hole in his
head, his shock of coarse black hair matted with blood, and his stony
eyes looking into mine. Well, I bandaged up my limb the best I might,
and started to crawl away, for our batteries had opened, and the grape
and canister that came hurtling down the slope passed but a few feet
over my head. It was slow and painful work, as you can imagine, but at
last, by dint of perseverance, I had dragged myself away to the left
of the direct range of the batteries, and, creeping to the verge of the
wood, looked off over the green slope. I understood by the crash and
roar of the guns, the yells and cheers of the men, and that hoarse
murmur which those who have been in battle know, but which I can not
describe in words, that there was hot work going on out there; but
never have I seen, no, not in that three days' desperate mêlée at the
Wilderness, nor at that terrific repulse we had at Cold Harbor, such
absolute slaughter as I saw that afternoon on the green slope of Malvern
Hill. The guns of the entire army were massed on the crest, and thirty
thousand of our infantry lay, musket in hand, in front. For eight
hundred yards the hill sank in easy declension to the wood, and across
this smooth expanse the Rebs must charge to reach our lines. It was
nothing short of downright insanity to order men to charge that hill;
and so his generals told Lee, but he would not listen to reason that
day, and so he sent regiment after regiment, and brigade after brigade,
and division after division, to certain death. Talk about Grant's
disregard of human life, his efforts at Cold Harbor and I ought to
know, for I got a Minie in my shoulder that day was hopeful and easy
work to what Lee laid on Hill's and Ma gruder's divisions at Malvern. It
was at the close of the second charge, when the yelling mass reeled back
from before the blaze of those sixty guns and thirty thousand rifles,
even as they began to break and fly backward toward the woods, that
I saw from the spot where I lay a riderless horse break out of the
confused and flying mass, and, with mane and tail erect and spreading
nostril, come dashing obliquely down the slope. Over fallen steeds and
heaps of the dead she leaped with a motion as airy as that of the flying
fox when, fresh and unjaded, he leads away from the hounds, whose sudden
cry has broken him off from hunting mice amid the bogs of the meadow. So
this riderless horse came vaulting along. Now from my earliest boyhood I
have had what horsemen call a 'weakness' for horses... Continue reading book >>
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