“Moving to the left, I find still more severe traces of artillery fighting.  Twenty-seven dead horses on a space of little more than one acre is evidence of heavy work.  Here are a few scattered trees, which were evidently used as a screen for our batteries.  These trees did not escape the storm of shot and shell that was rained in that direction.  Some of them were perforated by cannon-shot, or have been completely cut off in that peculiar splintering that marks the course of a projectile through green wood.  Near the scene of this fighting is a large pile of muskets and cartridge-boxes collected from the field.  Considerable work has been done in thus gathering the debris of the battle, but it is by no means complete.  Muskets, bayonets, and sabers are scattered everywhere.

“My next advance to the left carries me where the ground is thickly studded with graves.  In one group I count a dozen graves of soldiers belonging to the Twentieth Massachusetts; near them are buried the dead of the One Hundred and Thirty-seventh New York, and close at hand an equal number from the Twelfth New Jersey.  Care has been taken to place a head-board at each grave, with a legible inscription thereon, showing whose remains are resting beneath.  On one board the comrades of the dead soldier had nailed the back of his knapsack, which bore his name.  On another was a brass plate, bearing the soldier’s name in heavily stamped letters.

“Moving still to the left, I found an orchard in which the fighting appears to have been desperate in the extreme.  Artillery shot had plowed the ground in every direction, and the trees did not escape the fury of the storm.  The long bolts of iron, said by our officers to be a modification of the Whitworth projectile, were quite numerous.  The Rebels must have been well supplied with this species of ammunition, and they evidently used it with no sparing hand.  At one time I counted twelve of these bolts lying on a space not fifty feet square.  I am told that many shot and shell passed over the heads of our soldiers during the action.

“A mile from our central position at the cemetery, was a field of wheat, and near it a large tract, on which corn had been growing.  The wheat was trampled by the hurrying feet of the dense masses of infantry, as they changed their positions during the battle.  In the cornfield artillery had been stationed, and moved about as often as the enemy obtained its range.  Hardly a hill of corn is left in its pristine luxuriance.  The little that escaped the hoof or the wheel, as the guns moved from place to place, was nibbled by hungry horses during the bivouac subsequent to the battle.  Not a stalk of wheat is upright; not a blade of corn remains uninjured; all has fallen long before the time of harvest.  Another harvest, in which Death was the reaper, has been gathered above it.