First Battle  "Exhilarating Turns To Horrifying"

A Civil War soldier wrote to his home newspaper a description of his first experience on a battlefield:
 

The scene is on of the most exciting and exhilarating that can be conceived. Imagine a regiment passing you at 'double quick', the men cheering with enthusiasm, their teeth set, their eyes flashing, and the whole in a frenzy of resolution. The clear voices of officers ring along the line in tones of passionate eloquence, their words hot, thrilling and elastic. The word is given to march, and the body moves into action. For the first time in your life you listen to the whizzing of iron. Grape and canister fly into the ranks, bombshells burst overhead, and the fragments fly all round you. A friend falls; perhaps a dozen or twenty of your comrades lie wounded or dying at your feet; a strange, involuntary shrinking steals over you, which is impossible to resist. The cheek blanches, the lip quivers, and the eye almost hesitates to look upon the scene.

In this attitude you may, perhaps, be ordered to stand an hour inactive, havoc meanwhile marking its footsteps with blood on every side. Finally the order id given to advance, to fire, or to charge. And now, what a metamorphosis! With your first shot you became a new man. Personal safety is your least concern. Fear has no existence in your bosom. Hesitation gives way to an uncontrollable desire to rush into the thickest of the fight. You become cool and deliberate.

Such is the spirit which carries the soldier through the field of battle. But when the excitement has passed, when the roll of musketry has ceased, the nasty voices of the cannons are stilled, the dusky pall of sulphurous smoke has risen from the field, and you stroll over the theater of carnage, hearing the groans of the wounded, discovering here, shattered almost beyond recognition, the form of some dear friend whom only an hour before you met in the full flush of life and happiness, there another perforated by a bullet, a third with a limb shot away... then you begin to realize the horrors of war.

Fascinating Fact:  The battle over, the correspondent told of the aftermath: "Friend and foe alike now receive your kindest ministerings. The enemy, whom, but a short time before, full of hate, you were doing all in your power to kill, you now endeavor to save."


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