The whole corps was ordered out to witness the shooting of five deserters belonging to the One Hundred and Eighteenth Pennsylvania Volunteers. Each man followed his coffin, supported by two soldiers, with the chaplain following. They marched through the corps, which was drawn up beside a hill, passed down to an intervale, where the graves were dug. Each man sat on the foot of his coffin, with his eyes bandaged. A provost-guard of thirty-two men fired a volley—the men fell back in their coffins, dead. It was a sad sight.
SOURCE: John Lord Parker, Henry Wilson's Regiment: History of the Twenty-second Massachusetts Infantry, the Second Company Sharpshooters and the Third Light Battery, in the War of the Rebellion, pp. 279-80
