Their combat with Johnson’s Greens and Brant’s Mohawks had been fought; and, though masters of the field, they could do no more than hold their ground.  Perhaps the bitter knowledge that they must leave Stanwix to its fate, and that, too, through their own disobedience, made the better soldiers of them in time.  But it was a hard and dreadful lesson; and I saw men crying, faces hidden in their powder-blackened hands, as the dying General was borne through the ranks, lying gray and motionless on his hemlock litter.

And this is all that I myself witnessed of that shameful ambuscade and murderous combat, fought some two miles north of the dirty camp, and now known as the Battle of Oriskany.

That night we buried our dead; one hundred on the field where they had fallen, two hundred and fifty in the burial trenches at Oriskany—­thirty-five wagon-loads in all.  Scarcely an officer of rank remained to lead the funeral march when the muffled drums of the Palatines rolled at midnight, and the smoky torches moved, and the dead-wagons rumbled on through the suffocating darkness of a starless night.  We had few wounded; we took no prisoners; Oriskany meant death.  We counted only thirty men disabled and some score missing.

“God grant the missing be safely dead,” prayed our camp chaplain at the burial trench.  We knew what that meant; worse than dead were the wretched men who had fallen alive into the hands of old John Butler and his son, Walter, and that vicious drunkard, Barry St. Leger, who had offered, over his own signature, two hundred and forty dollars a dozen for prime Tryon County scalps.

I slept little that night, partly from the excitement of my first serious combat, partly because of the terrible heat.  Our outposts, now painfully overzealous and alert, fired off their muskets at every fancied sound or movement, and these continual alarms kept me awake, though Mount and Murphy slept peacefully, and Elerson yawned on guard.

Towards sunrise rain fell heavily, but brought no relief from the heat; the sun, a cherry-red ball, hung a hand’s-breadth over the forests when the curtain of rain faded away.  The riflemen, curled up in the hay on the barn floor, snored on, unconscious; the batt-horses crunched and munched in the manger; flies whirled and swarmed over a wheelbarrow piled full of dead soldier’s shoes, which must to-day be distributed among the living.

All the loathsome and filthy side of war seemed concentrated around the barn-yard, where sleepy, unshaven, half-dressed soldiers were burning the under-clothes of a man who had died of the black measles; while a great, brawny fellow, naked to the waist and smeared from hair to ankles with blood, butchered sheep, so that the army might eat that day.

The thick stench of the burning clothing, the odor of blood, the piteous bleating of the doomed creatures sickened me; and I made my way out of the barn and down to the river, where I stripped and waded out to wash me and my clothes.