HEADQUARTERS 54TH REGT.
O. V. INF.,
CAMP NO. 8 BEFORE CORINTH,
May 24, 1862.
MY DEAR MOTHER:
In the midst of "battle and murder and sudden
death," your letter of the 12th inst. is handed me. I snatch a hasty
moment to reply. I have waited for many days for the time to come when I might
sit down to write you as I would wish, but the hurry of the march, the
incessant labor at the breastworks, the din of the skirmish leave no
opportunity for writing. I have slept in my clothes with bridle in hand for the
past ten days and nights. We are close upon Corinth. Our pickets within sight
of the enemy's entrenchments. My troops stack arms behind our own breastworks,
and there I bivouac. You must, judging from the slips you sent me, have very
meagre accounts of the movements of Sherman's Division. I have asked wife to
forward the newspaper intelligence, which is partly reliable, and with which the
Cincinnati papers have been filled. Pretty full accounts, I am told, have also
been published in the New York Herald, a correspondent of which is with
the division, and there also will be found Sherman's and Stuart's reports.
Sherman's report is decidedly the best account of the battles of the 6th and
7th, and Stuart's will locate the position of our brigade in the field those
days. Many papers published in St. Louis and Chicago and local country papers
in Ohio have been sent me in which my name is prominently mentioned, and they
have been pleased to compliment me. I am only conscious of having tried to do
my duty. Acts of heroism were rife those days, and thousands of brave hearts
ceased to beat. I rode many a weary mile over the dead and dying. Some of these
days, if we live to meet, I will tell you some of the horrors of that battle.
Strange how soon one becomes blunted to horror. How little one thinks of human
suffering and death and despair. I could tell you of trenches dug and filled
with bodies, packed to lie close ; of gentlemen of the South, whose delicate
hands, ringed fingers, and fine linen gave evidence of high birth and position.
Twenty, thirty together in one hole; men thrown in head downward or upward,
clotted, mutilated, bloody, sometimes a man and horse together, and in the
midst of these graves and trenches and the carrion of hundreds of dead horses,
I camped for twenty-two days, right on that part of the battlefield which was
the very charnel, and right where I halted my brigade on Monday night. From
thence our course has been forward; every inch of the ground stubbornly
contested by the enemy. We have crossed the State line from Tennessee, and now
in Mississippi by regular parallels approach the stronghold of the enemy; for
every commanding ridge or hill there is a fight, a skirmish we call it here,
and think but little of forty or fifty killed and one or two hundred wounded. .
. . It is a terrible war in all its phases. God grant that our beloved country
be once again blessed with peace. How little did we appreciate the blessing!
how priceless now would be its restoration! You ask for incidents interesting
to me. I wish, dear mother, I could gratify you. If I only had memory and a
graphic pen I could give you a startling history, something in comparison to
which the scenes in Scott and James would seem tame, but my aversion to writing
amounts to a mania. I shrink from pen and paper as a mad dog does from water,
and save to you and wife, I write ne'er a line to man or woman. I wish I had never
learned to write, and could set my seal like the knights of old instead of
affixing the signature which has also become distasteful to me. I ought to tell
you of some of my night marches when I have been ordered out in rain and utter
darkness with my own regiment, unsupported, and with no one to divide the
responsibility, and none but a doubtful resident as a guide. How, at the head
of my men, with the guide's bridle in one hand and a pistol in the other to
shoot him should he prove recreant, I have marched for miles through the
pathless and almost impenetrable swamp, my men toiling after me with their
cartridge-boxes slung at bayonet point to keep the powder dry. How with clothes
wringing wet they have lain in ambuscade till day-dawn right under the enemy's
guns without fire or food, word or whisper, till gray dawn, and then making
reconnoissance, steal silently back. I could tell you of my charge when my
color-guard were all killed, and my standard-bearer swept away by a falling
tree, a tree cut sheer off by the solid shot from a cannon; how my gallant
horse pressed right through rank after rank and enabled me to rescue my flag;
or I could tell how the same gallant stallion (and I thank God he stands now
unscathed right near me munching his oats) by three successive leaps bore me
right up, not down, a precipice of rock almost perpendicular, and when one
could hardly have found foot-hold for an antelope. For the first time in my
life on horseback I closed my eyes in fear. Jagged rocks were behind me, a
sheer perpendicular wall in front; here and there a fissure where the wild vine
caught root. I thought he must have fallen backwards and that I must die
ingloriously mangled under him, but with unequalled power and activity he bore
me to the top, and there amidst a perfect rain of balls he tossed his head and
flung his neigh like a clear ringing trumpet. These things should be for others
to tell; it is not mine after I have fought my battle to tell my own story, but
alas! there are so many stories to tell that it is hard to find a historian;
and one's comrade, in scenes such as these transpiring, has enough to do to
take care of himself instead of taking care of another's fame and notes to give
it wing. Speaking of fame, I may as well give up the hope of it. This name of
Smith, in these latter days, attaches to too many good men and true, to say
nothing of the damned rascals who also inherit it. There are four colonels, one
a Kirby Smith from Ohio. There is your friend, E. Kirby Smith of Southern
notoriety, and now, to cap the climax, I have been brigaded with Morgan L.
Smith, the hero of Fort Donaldson. He is a dashing, fighting man, and we have
an eminently fighting brigade, the left flank of which I still retain; but a
man by the name of Smith might as well attempt to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced
moon as to win fame. If I figure in the ball, the scribblers attach the feat to
Morgan; if he performs some dauntless deed of heroism, I get the glory. But as
I have said and written, this is not the war or the field in which to gather
laurels; it is unholy, unnatural fratricide. As well might he who has buried
his knife in his brother's heart rush forth and exultingly brandish the
dripping blade as evidence of good deed done, as he, the executioner of the law
(for we are nothing else than executioners sent forth by Government to see the
law enforced), offer his trophies, the wrung heart of the widow and fatherless,
the ruined plantation, the devastated field, the destruction of the fond hopes
of the loving, the ruined patrimony of the unborn, claiming fame, glory, and
renown. In sadness and sorrow we draw the sword, the true soldier and patriot
sheathes it in the body of the rebel in the same spirit as the patriarch of old
offered his son.
But, my dear mother, I must write you of yourself. I received
two letters from wife, one acquainting me with your illness, one of your
convalescence; but I am grieved and shocked that you should have been so ill.
You have been worried about me, and your anxiety has affected your head and
brought on those dreadful hemorrhages. I know how prone you are to borrow
trouble and always fear the worst; but don't fear for me, dear mother; the same
God to whom you nightly pray for me will hear your prayers and the prayers of
my wife and children. I have firm reliance upon Him, that He will uphold,
sustain, and strengthen me, and bring me out of the conflict unharmed. If it
should be my lot to go under — if I should fall, believe me, dear mother, I
shall fall with my face to the foe, and then, in the language of the poet who has
written the beautiful lines you have sent me, "Yield him 'neath the
chastening rod, to His Country and his God."
But banish all apprehensions from your mind. A few years,
perhaps a few short months, will intervene when you and I together will join those
who have gone before us, when we shall solve the great problem, fathom the
great gulf, and relying on the Holy Word of God walk with the loved ones in the
paths of Paradise. A little, only a little while, and the battle of life for
both of us, dear mother, will have been fought, and, with God's help, the
victory won.
SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of
Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 205-9
