The soldiers learned at the first roar of the rebel muskets what all battle veterans already knew: whether a man lived or died was a matter of chance. Corporal Benjamin Chase was in a thick wood within thirty yards of the enemy when the first volley came. “It was a wonder that I dident get killed as I was right among them all,” he wrote his mother. “The boys that got killed and wounded stood right beside of me.” One aspect of the experience troubled him deeply. He had been “awfull luckey in not getting wounded,” he wrote, but “it was a hard sight to see the dead and wounded lay on the battle ground.” Private Spalding wrote his cousin Mary: “I was’nt scared, not much—at least I didn’t tremble any. One man was shot while standing but a few feet from me. He was shot through the head and lived but a short time, but I had got so use to seeing men killed that I thought nothing of it.”

The Confederate line fell back, and on Cross’s orders, the Fifth again advanced and fired at close range. “Our officers to a man rallied our brave boys to the work of death,” said Lieutenant Moore. “So severe was the rebel’s fire, that it seemed as if all our men would go down.” Cross wrote that his regiment behaved nobly, “only two or three showing the white feather.” Seeing that some men were being hit with buckshot, he ordered a third advance. As he shouted “Forward in line!” a minie ball pierced his left thigh and passed cleanly through. The colonel kept his feet for a few moments then sagged to the ground. During the battle he “raged like a lion,” his men told a correspondent from the Cincinnati Commercial, and “when his long body fell he went down like a pine tree.” Cross propped himself up and continued to give commands. A spray of buckshot stung him in the right temple, “a ball passed through my hat, and one through the sleeve of my blouse—in all seven balls struck my person,” he wrote. Moore saw Cross sitting against a tree, his face covered with blood. Men were trying to help him, but Cross gestured wildly, ordering them to fight on. “Go back!” Moore heard him cry. “Forward! Forward! Charge the devils! Charge them!”

(c) copyright 2001