Three Years in the Confederate Horse Artillery — George Michael Neese.

August 12 — This morning at daylight we renewed our march and moved to Richmond, where we put our guns on the cars for shipment to Gordonsville; then we moved with our horses out on the Brook turnpike to Brook Church, some two or three miles northwest of Richmond, and camped.

The pike between Richmond and Petersburg almost touches the James River at Drewry’s Bluff. Our battery halted near the bluff to-day, and I went and looked at the heavy battery there, and its environments. Drewry’s Bluff, in the strict sense of the word, is no bluff, but only an abrupt dipping down, to the waters of the James, of an elevated and wooded plateau of a Chesterfield landscape. A little way from the top of the declivitous slope the battery is advantageously located by being countersunk into the face of the hill, giving the guns a sweeping command of the river below; of course the defense is no Gibraltar, by any means. The siege guns are of heavy caliber, and the whole battery has a first-class, sweeping range down the river. Right at the bluff the river makes a turn to the left,— the battery being on the right bank,— which gives the guns an excellent and perfect line range for several miles down the river. At the bluff the river is comparatively narrow, but widens out considerably into a broad and beautiful sheet of water just below the battery. Drewry’s Bluff is about nine miles below Richmond, in Chesterfield County. From what little I observed today it seems to me that the service of a heavy artilleryman at Drewry’s Bluff is much easier than the service of a horse artilleryman in the field. There the men are in good comfortable quarters month in and month out, year in and year out, with rations regular, while we are everlastingly marching and racing through sunshine and rain, sometimes day and night, pursuing or being pursued, over hill and dale, mountain and plain, like the fleet-winged wind and sometimes almost as empty, especially so when the rations burn low in the haversack.

August 11—Last night a while after dark, and when we had already repaired to our blanket beds and were ready to enter the gates of dreamland, a blast from our bugle suddenly stirred up the whole camp. The first impression was that the Yanks were right on us, but happily such was not the case, for we were ordered to pack up our all and get ready for a moving march. The night was very dark for the marching business, nevertheless little after ten o’clock I heard the order, “Drivers mount, forward march,” and we were on the move toward Petersburg. We marched until nearly dawn, then dropped by the wayside and took a little snooze until daylight, when we renewed our march, passing through Petersburg, across the Appomattox, and moved about five miles up the Richmond road, and camped for the night.

Everything around Petersburg looks, sounds, and feels warrish. The sharpshooters are almost incessantly pegging away at one another along the line of earth works, and now and then the Yanks throw a shell into the city to scare the women. I saw about thirty little mortars to-day in a field just below Petersburg. They are made of oak timber, the base lined with sheet copper, and are used for firing short range bombs into the enemy’s fortifications and earthworks, which at some points are close to General Lee’s line of defense.

August 8 — A farmer from the neighborhood drove into camp to-day with a load of watermelons. He also had a keg of something in his wagon that he called cider-oil, but judging from the sportive effects it produced all over camp the cider had something else in it much stronger than common apple juice, for it had more fun and merriment mixed with it to the square inch than any cider that I ever saw or tasted. Soon after the delicious and palatable draught passed the palate dull care and the wearisome monotony of camp life began to hie away and hide in the woods, while innocent mirth, jollity, and fun ruled the hour and hilarity reveled and reigned in its merriest glee. Some of the men were making happy little stump speeches, while others were singing comical songs, as “A little more cider for Miss Dinah,” etc. Some of the boys got a little lower down and were crawling around on all fours and trying to squeal like pigs. The whole pleasant comedy commenced and ended in frolicsome fun, and it was undoubtedly the merriest afternoon that the old battery has ever seen, and in days and years to come cherished memories will ofttimes return and lift the curtain of time and gaze with playful delight on the joyous scene of cider-oil day on the banks of Stony Creek in the pines of Sussex.

August 7 — For the last week the weather has been oppressively hot in these low piny woods. The drinking water in this immediate section of country is warmish and tastes bad.

To-day I was at Sappony Church at preaching. “Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom” was the text to-day.

August 1 — To-day we moved back again toward the Nottoway River. This evening we are camped in a low pine woods on the right bank of Stony Creek, west of the Weldon Railroad, and about twenty miles south of Petersburg. The land around camp is poor, some of the fields being nothing but white shiny sand with a few sickly briers scattered over it.

July 31 — We moved camp this morning about a mile. To-day the Yankees advanced along the Weldon Railroad somewhere north of Ream’s Station. We were ordered to Ream’s Station, but before we got there the Yankees fell back, and we returned to camp. John Esten Cooke, a noted and interesting writer, and inspector-general of the cavalry corps and horse artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia, camped with the horse artillery last night. After night settled down on the thickets of the Rowanty our battalion glee club serenaded the distinguished writer with some of their best songs.

July 30 — This morning between dawn and sunrise a deep, heavy, thundering roll of sound swept over the country from the direction of Petersburg. I wonder what in the thunder the Yankees have invented now, for, from the way the air trembled and the ground shook, the deep heavy boom was not caused by any common artillery. The thing went loose just as I was getting up out of bed, and I perceptibly felt a wave of air rush past me, not like a wind, but like a roll of compressed air pushing against me, although we are camped about nine miles from Petersburg, and the volcano was not far from the city.

Immediately after the first deep thunder-like roll passed away it was followed by the more familiar sound of a terrific artillery fire, that raged furiously for a while. A heavy crash of musketry also roared and rolled wildly through the morning air across the lowlands of the Appomattox and the quiet fields of Dinwiddie, speaking in unerring tones of blood and thunder, destruction and death.

This afternoon we got news from Petersburg. The strange heavy boom we heard early this morning was caused by the ingenious Yankees springing a mine under a small portion of General Lee’s works a little over a mile from Petersburg. I suppose that General Grant’s object in the burrowing business was to pierce General Lee’s line and make a lodgment within his earthworks; if that was the design, its execution proved to be an utter and costly failure, and the whole scheme was a total miscarriage in its final consummation.

After the explosion the Yankee infantry attempted to charge through the yawning breach, but they were met by our infantry and greeted with a storm of shell from General Lee’s batteries. A regular fierce battle ensued, in which the charging Yankees were shot down by the hundred; from all accounts it was a regular slaughter pen and the crater of their homemade volcano became the threshold of death to hundreds of Union soldiers.

There was one division of colored troops in the charging column, and when they rushed and crowded into the extinct volcano and death trap our infantry slaughtered them fearfully at a wholesale schedule rate. I do not know whether the colored troops were former slaves or not, but I suppose that the survivors are deeply impressed with the striking idea that the road to Freedom’s blissful goal lies through a blasted deadly hole. I do wonder what the gentle, sympathetical and philanthropical Aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe thinks of this sort of emancipation, of striking off the shackle of bondage one day and the next march the dear creatures into a hole and have them shot down by the hundred. Poor Uncle Tom! But the dear old lady ought to be perfectly satisfied and gratified, for the great butchery to-day was the effect of a grand and glorious Yankee invention for transferring the Uncle Toms from slavery and the fields of yellow corn to the blissful realms of freedom, by making angels out of them in bunches of five hundred at a time. I do not pretend to guess what the enemy expected to accomplish by their volcanic fireworks, but the whole affair was a sort of brutal monster, a hybrid between a blunder and a boomerang, for I heard that the Yanks lost about four thousand men in the little experiment, and those that made a permanent lodgment in our line will never need any more lodging. Dust to dust.

July 29 — This morning we left our camp on the Nottoway and moved in the direction of Ream’s Station. When we arrived near Ream’s we turned to the left, away from the railroad, and are camped this evening about four miles west of Ream’s Station, and on the Rowanty, a little winding stream formed by Hatcher’s Run and Gravelly Run. We crossed Stony Creek today, a small stream in Dinwiddie County; it empties into the Nottoway River about two miles southeast of Stony Creek Station.

Ream’s Station is on the Petersburg and Weldon Railroad, about ten miles south of Petersburg. Stony Creek Station is ten miles below Ream’s.

July 28 — From the 21st to the 27th of July I was on the sick list, with a painful abscess on my jaw. Just before the abscess burst it pained so acutely that I cried like an old woman, a beautiful performance indeed for a soldier in the field to go through with.