Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/207

 The Great Battle at Cedar Creek. 199

ground, supposedly to die. The men, charging on, gallantly drove the enemy from their position, routed, and I was afterwards told that this was the last charge made by our forces, supposing them too badly routed to make another stand.

That ball, of course, ended my personal participation in that battle, and I knew nothing personally of Sheridan's rally and after- noon attack, except in the finale.

I was picked up on a stretcher, taken to the field hospital, where I was laid on the ground, and a knapsack under my head, until the surgeons came to me. Dr. Sutton, Dr. Morton, and two or three more. They looked at the wound, ran their fingers into it, and, as they afterwards told me, felt the ball lodged in the muscles in front of the backbone, and seeing that the ball had abraided the main artery of the neck, from which I was bleeding like a hog, they concluded it would surely kill me to cut for the ball, and believing I would die anyway, just bound me up.

BACK TO RICHMOND.

The surgeons then sent me in an ambulance just starting with Colonel Davis, of our brigade. His arm had been shot off, and we were carried to the house of the Mayor ofStrasburg, where he was taken in. As the drivers and helpers came out of the house some of our cavalry came dashing in. shouting: "We are flanked! Get out! Get out!" Jumping in, they drove furiously on, and when they came to a bridge over a ditch which crossed the road about midway to Fisher's Hill, in attempting to cross.it they turned the ambulance over with me in it. In a few minutes bullets came plugging through the ambulance from the Yanks up on the hillside. Though I had been given strict injunction not to move hand or foot, for fear of breaking open the artery, I crawled out and into an ordnance wagon which a jam had temporarily stopped, although the driver threatened to brain me with his whip. So finally I reached Fisher's Hill, where I recognized the voice of our surgeons, and crawling out, was fortunate to catch one of the ambulances about to start with wounded for the rear, and so at last, to Rich- mond, etc., etc., etc.

CLARENCE R. HATTON. 17 Park Row, New York, 1906.