May 9 — The orderly sergeant and I bivouacked last night about two hundred yards from the company bivouac and in a secluded little nook of brushwood. At midnight the company received marching orders and moved away and left us, in our leafy chamber unfound, plunged in the profound and velvety depths of nature’s charmed restorer, where we unconsciously lingered under the dreamland trees until broad daylight.
When we awoke everything around was still, and quiet reigned supreme; the battery was gone, and we had no idea when it left or which way it went, and as we were not far from the Yankee line when we arrived yester eve we were not certain this morning at first thought but that the blue lines swept past us during the night. We hurriedly put ourselves in marching order and cautiously proceeded in the direction of Spottsylvania Court House, as men without a company searching for our command; after about a two hours’ hunt we found our battery at Shady Grove on the Spottsylvania Court House road, some four or five miles from where we bivouacked last night.
General Grant, who is in command of all the Yankee forces in the army of the Potomac, is getting out of the Wilderness by moving to his left and toward tide-water. His first forward march to Richmond through the Wilderness went up in death, defeat, and frustration, and the next move will be by the Wilderness, on toward the Rebel capital. But before he fights another week he will learn that he is not fooling with General Pemberton at Vicksburg. Our army is moving rapidly to the right, trying to keep up with General Grant’s flanking process and base-changing business. General A. P. Hill’s corps passed us at Shady Grove, marching rapidly toward Spottsylvania Court House. About two o’clock this afternoon some Yankee batteries commenced shelling some of General Lee’s wagon trains on the Spottsylvania Court House road about five miles northwest of the Court House. A whole corps of Yankee infantry was advancing toward the same point in the road at which their battery was firing. We were ordered there in double-quick time, and when we arrived at the point in the road that the enemy was shelling we went in battery and immediately opened a rapid fire on the Yankee battery; when we opened we were under the impression that there was nothing there but a battery, and perhaps a few cavalry raiders, but after we fired about forty shell I saw a column of infantry debouch from a wood on our left front, headed for our position and coming right at us. When they arrived at a point for good rifle range they threw out a heavy skirmish line and opened fire, and still came on with overwhelming numbers. We had no support whatever, but we stuck to our position until the Yankee infantry commenced pouring a heavy fire into us at close range; then we left in double-quick style amid a storm of Yankee bullets and shell. Just as we were limbering up to leave, a shell from one of the Yankee batteries exploded right over one of our teams, and the fragments screamed fearfully for a moment. One of our drivers was struck by a fragment and rolled off his horse, frightened and fully convinced that he was seriously wounded. He looked as white as a sheet, and I knew that he already felt the pangs of his terrible wound; but when he looked for blood and was searching for the gaping flesh he found nothing but a half-pound fragment of warm casting in his trousers pocket, which had lodged there from the exploded shell, and that was happily the whole extent of his serious wound. After we were driven from our position we moved back to Shady Grove and camped for the night.
