Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 23.djvu/38

 32 Southern Historical Society Papers.

way, thus leaving Hampton at Kilpatrick's picket post, with the key to the lock of the situation well in hand. A " council of war" was held with General Wheeler, and in a short time Hampton and Wheeler were walking through and around Kilpatrick's camp, where all was still as death, save across the road, where the provost guard kept a close watch over some twenty-five of our men, who had been captured along the route from Columbia, and were all barefooted and bareheaded and almost naked. Mr. Flynn Davis, a brother of Colonel Zimmerman Davis, and Mr. Frank Niernsee, with his brother, Reuben Niernsee, now of Washington, D. C. , were among the prisoners recaptured. Just at the break of day, a few minutes after the formation of the line, and in the midst of that profound silence which precedes the storm of a battle, General Butler ordered Colonel Gid. Wright and Hugh Scott by his side, with the gallant old Cobb Legion, to lead the charge, followed by the rest of Butler's "Spartan band." No charge was ever made with more determination. The charge of the "Scotch Greys" at Waterloo was not equal to it. General Wheeler was ordered to support us on the right, but unfortunately his horse bogged up in the miry woods, and, like Moses of old and the promised land, they could see us and hear of us, but could not get to us at once. Oh, that I had the power to depict this hand-to-hand fight ! The men on both sides were brave, and fought with more desperation than I had ever before seen. Victor Hugo says "a certain amount of tem- pest is always mingled with a battle." Every historian traces to some extent the lineament that pleases him in the hurly-burly. What is a battle? An oscillation. The immobility of a mathe- matical plan expresses a minute and not a day. To paint a battle those powerful painters who have chaos in their pencils are needed. Let us add that there is always a certain moment in which the battle generates into a combat is particularized and broken up into countless and detail facts. The historian in such a case has the evi- dent right to sum up; he can only catch the principal outlines of the struggle, and it is not given to any narrator, however conscientious he may be, to absolutely fix the form of that horrible cloud which is called "the battle." Butler's men charged down the road, and as soon as they rode over the sleeping men in blue, they wheeled their horses, and rode over them again three times they rode over them while the men under the blankets would say, "we surrender," but would fight like tigers when they saw so few ' ' grey coats. ' ' Soon