No further pursuit being made by Kershaw’s Brigade during the day, it was allowed to rest after its day and night march and the bloody and trying ordeal of the morning.  Friends were hunting out friends among the dead and wounded.  The litter-bearers were looking after those too badly wounded to make their way to the rear.

Dr. Salmond had established his brigade hospital near where the battle had begun in the morning, and to this haven of the wounded those who were able to walk were making their way.  In the rear of a battlefield are scenes to sickening for sensitive eyes and ears.  Here you see men, with leg shattered, pulling themselves to the rear by the strength of their arms alone, or exerting themselves to the utmost to get to some place where they will be partially sheltered from the hail of bullets falling all around; men, with arms swinging helplessly by their sides, aiding some comrade worse crippled than themselves; others on the ground appealing for help, but are forced to remain on the field amid all the carnage going on around them, helpless and almost hopeless, until the battle is over, and, if still alive, await their turn from the litter-bearers.  The bravest and best men dread to die, and the halo that surrounds death upon the battlefield is but scant consolation to the wounded soldier, and he clings to life with that same tenacity after he has fallen, as the man of the world in “piping times of peace.”

Just in rear of where Colonel Nance fell, I saw one of the saddest sights I almost ever witnessed.  A soldier from Company C, Third South Carolina, a young soldier just verging into manhood, had been shot in the first advance, the bullet severing the great artery of the thigh.  The young man seeing his danger of bleeding to death before succor could possibly reach him, had struggled behind a small sapling.  Bracing himself against it, he undertook deliberative measures for saving his life.  Tying a handkerchief above the wound, placing a small stone underneath and just over the artery, and putting a stick between the handkerchief and his leg, he began to tighten by twisting the stick around.  But too late; life had fled, leaving both hands clasping the stick, his eyes glassy and fixed.

The next day was devoted to the burying of the dead and gathering such rest as was possible.  It was my misfortune to be wounded near the close of the engagement, in a few feet of where lay the lamented Colonel Nance.  The regiment in some way became doubled up somewhat on the center, perhaps in giving way for the Second to come in, and here lay the dead in greater numbers than it was ever my fortune to see, not even before the stone wall at Fredericksburg.