May 6 — Very heavy musketry and some cannonading for about three hours this morning, in the direction of Chancellorsville, which was the opening chorus of a general battle that raged furiously all day along our lines. Our battery was engaged nearly all day, and had some very warm and dangerous work on hand just on the right of General Longstreet’s line. We fought cavalry and infantry, and were under the fire of a battalion of Yankee artillery for awhile, but held our position all day, and so did the Yanks in our immediate front. The fierce, sharp roar of deadly musketry filled our ears from morning till night, and a thick white cloud of battle smoke hung pall-like over the fields and woods all day along the battle lines. The smoke was so thick and dense sometimes during the day that it was impossible to discern anything fifty paces away, and at midday the smoke was so thick overhead that I could just make out to see the sun, and it looked like a vast ball of red fire hanging in a smoke-veiled sky. The country all along the lines, which is mostly timber land, was set on fire early in the day by the explosion of shell and heavy musketry; a thousand fires blazed and crackled on the bloody arena, which added new horrors and terrors to the ghastly scene spread out over the battle plain. A thousand new volumes of smoke rolled up toward the sky that was already draped with clouds of battle smoke. The hissing flames, the sharp, rattling, crashing roar of musketry, the deep bellowing of the artillery mingled with the yelling of charging, struggling, fighting war machines, the wailing moans of the wounded and the fainter groans of the dying, all loudly acclaimed the savagery of our boasted civilization and the enlightened barbarism of the nineteenth century. Even the midday sun refused to look with anything but a faint red glimmer on the tragical scene that was being enacted in the tangled underbrush where the lords of creation were struggling and slaughtering each other like wild beasts in a jungle.
We are bivouacked to-night just in rear of General Lee’s infantry. The night is dark, and the woods around us are all on fire; all the dead trees scattered through the woods are ablaze from bottom to top, and the fire has crept out on every branch, glowingly painting a fiery, weird scene on the curtain of night, while the lurid woods throws a glare of sickly yellow light on the smoky sky.
It is now ten o’clock at night and the dreadful sounds of battle that rolled along the lines all day are stilled at last by the hush of night.
