Friday, May 20th.
At daylight this morning I was informed that Sergt. Lock “got” his sharpshooter last night, but that the man was of no use to himself or anybody else after the Sergeant’s attentions. Getting my little squad in line, we moved by the flank in rather “open order” through the woods and across the fields to the camp which we had left the day before, where I found that many of my men had preceded me during the night. Lynch was most demonstrative in his welcome, announcing in stentorian tones that the Captain was not “kilted after all.” Upon mustering the Company for roll-call, I found that we had suffered severely, Sergt. Judson A. Smith, Artificer Gould R. Benedict and privates Joseph Housel, Jr. and William R. Mead having been killed, and First Sergt. Theben, Corp. Harned and privates Abbey, Adams, Brockelbank, Butler, Bullock, Cole, Phelps, Allen R. Smith, Sanford and Lyke, wounded, while Sergt. David B. Jones and privates Asa Smith and Charles M. Struble were missing. The day was spent caring for the wounded, burying the dead, our own as well as those of the enemy, and throwing up a line of rifle-pits where we were engaged the day before. Trenches were dug in the light soil some six feet wide and two or three feet deep, and the dead were laid side by side with no winding sheets but overcoats or blankets, though occasionally an empty box which had contained Springfield rifles did duty as a coffin. Care was taken to cover the faces of the dead with the capes of their overcoats or with blankets, and where the name, company, regiment, division or corps could be ascertained, the information was written in pencil on a board or smoothly whittled piece of wood, which was driven into the earth at the man’s, head, and the grounds about the Harris House presented the appearance of a cemetery. I particularly noticed among the rebel dead a handsome boy of perhaps eighteen years, who, though clad in the dirty butternut-colored uniform of a private, showed every indication of gentle birth and refined home surroundings. His hands and feet were small and delicately moulded; his skin white and soft as a woman’s, and his hair, where not matted by the blood from a cruel wound in the forehead, was fair and wavy as silk, and as I thought of the desolate home somewhere in the South, thus robbed of its pride and its joy, and of the loving mother who would never know where her darling was laid, tears actually came to my eyes, and I turned away leaving the poor boy to find a resting place at the hands of a burial party of a not ungenerous foe.
Later in the day, as Sergeant Jones did not report to camp, I went out on the field and opened the heads of a number of graves where there were no names, or where the identification of the occupant on the boards or stakes was incomplete, but was unable to find his body.
We learned to-day that the force which attacked us yesterday was Gen’l Ewell’s Corps, and that the repulse which it met was a signal one.
Such was the battle of Pine Grove or Harris Farm as it was called, so far as I personally saw or had anything to do with it, but in Gen’l Meade’s congratulatory order on the result, our battalion was not even mentioned though it lost seventy-four men.
