Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/50

 42 Southern Historical Society Papers.

venting Millroy from crossing to attack the entrenchments, the bat- tle culminated into an artillery duel of three hours' duration, when the enemy fell back. During this artillery duel the writer witnessed as cool a piece of daring as he saw but once after during the war. He was lying down in his place in the trench at the extreme point, near the enemy's battery and directly beneath our own, in line of the di- rect fire. The next man to to the left of him was private Robert Blackburn, the present postmaster of Antioch, Va., who was sitting up, a twelve pound shell fell in the trench between us, its firing, hissing fuse rapidly burning, predicating death or wounds to all in that part of the trench. There was no time for me to rise and throw it out, so I exclaimed, as it fell: "Throw her out, Bob." Instantly he seized it and hurled it over the bank of trench, and it scarcely rolled twenty feet before it exploded. Here was a fair specimen of our demoralization, so curtly mentioned in Mrs. Lee's history. In- deed, Colonel (afterward General) Edward Johnson paid the men the compliment to say, ' ' They were as immobile under fire as a par- cel of tarrapins on a sandbar."

AT CHEAT MOUNTAIN.

Soon after this General Robert E. Lee, then in command in West Virginia, when he planned an attack on Cheat mountain from the west, called for 2,500 volunteers from this force to storm the entrench- ments from the east. He got them, and they marched to position at midnight, awaiting all day for the signal guns from the west side that never came. General Lee could not have deemed them suf- fering much from demoralization.

Late in the fall our forces fell back to the top of the Alleghany for winter quarters, Colonel Edward Johnson in command. On the night of the 25th of December, the enemy, 5,000 strong, under Mill- roy, made a night march in a snowstorm to surprise us. Our pickets, on the turnpike road up the mountain, were bayoneted, rolled up in their blankets, asleep on their posts. Our men were round their camp-fires, cooking breakfast; the " Buckeyes " suddenly appeared, firing into them. Surprised and overpowered by such numbers, our men scattered in disorder, falling back some thousand yards and halted. Colonel Johnson, in his night-clothes, slippers and over- coat for there was no time left to dress put himself at their head, with an "old grub" picked up, and charged the enemy, our force growing at each step by the surprised men. For a short time it was