Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/205

 General Joseph Eggleston Johnston. 205

loss, as I now remember it, being about forty thousand and John- ston's ten thousand. As accounting for this great disparity in losses, and as indicating the gallantry and fierceness of some of General Sherman's partial sssaults, I refer to his attack upon that part of our line at Kenesaw Mountain, known afterwards by the Confederates as " Cheatham's Angle," by the Federals as the " Dead Angle," where he massed a division in columns of four lines, brigade front, and stormed a salient, almost a right angle in our line the first line of the storming column coming in a rushing run, with bayonets fixed, with guns loaded but uncapped the idea being that we were forti- fied (as we were) and that the first line should not break the force and momentum of the charge by stopping to fire, but to take us with the bayonet in a rushing onset. It was a gallant, a magnificent charge, but a most disastrous failure, for when the front line of the attacking force arrived within thirty paces of our line, strongly for- tified with breastworks and head logs, it encountered our abattis, which was made of sharpened brush and tree tops, with the sharp- ened points projecting toward the enemy and spread out about thirty paces in front of our line, and built to the height of a man's waist. When the front line of the storming column reached this formidable obstruction it was compelled to halt, and the rear lines closed upon it. In the mean time a deadly fire, at short range, had been opened from our line upon the front and both flanks of the assaulting column, and for a few moments the carnage was awful too awful to be long endured by human courage or mortal sacrifice. The column that obstructed fired in great confusion for a few moments, and then stag- gering and falling, it fled to a lodgment under the brow of the hill on which our line was located, leaving eight hundred dead in the space of about two hundred paces iront, as I was informed by a Fed- eral officer, as he and I looked upon the appalling scene three days afterward during a truce to bury the Federal dead. Johnston's losses in this engagement were insignificant by virtue of his complete de fences, being at this point something less than twenty.

Those of us who served under General Johnston fully appreciate the sagacity and wisdom of General Sherman's policy in never en- gaging him in a general battle when in position, for when he was attacked he fought with the desperation of a crowded lion.

To summarize : During this campaign, brilliant on both sides, Johnston retreated nearly one hundred miles, fighting to some ex- tent almost daily, never losing a dollar's worth of commissary or quartermaster stores. Sherman said he retreated with clean heels,