Nevertheless their losses were considerable, including several hundred prisoners taken from a sheltered place whence they did not care to rise and run.  The entire loss was about fourteen hundred men, of whom nearly one-half fell killed and wounded in Hazen’s brigade in less than thirty minutes of actual fighting.

General Johnston says: 

“The Federal dead lying near our line were counted by many persons, officers and soldiers.  According to these counts there were seven hundred of them.”

This is obviously erroneous, though I have not the means at hand to ascertain the true number.  I remember that we were all astonished at the uncommonly large proportion of dead to wounded—­a consequence of the uncommonly close range at which most of the fighting was done.

The action took its name from a water-power mill near by.  This was on a branch of a stream having, I am sorry to say, the prosaic name of Pumpkin Vine Creek.  I have my own reasons for suggesting that the name of that water-course be altered to Sunday-School Run.

FOUR DAYS IN DIXIE

During a part of the month of October, 1864, the Federal and Confederate armies of Sherman and Hood respectively, having performed a surprising and resultless series of marches and countermarches since the fall of Atlanta, confronted each other along the separating line of the Coosa River in the vicinity of Gaylesville, Alabama.  Here for several days they remained at rest—­at least most of the infantry and artillery did; what the cavalry was doing nobody but itself ever knew or greatly cared.  It was an interregnum of expectancy between two regimes of activity.

I was on the staff of Colonel McConnell, who commanded an infantry brigade in the absence of its regular commander.  McConnell was a good man, but he did not keep a very tight rein upon the half dozen restless and reckless young fellows who (for his sins) constituted his “military family.”  In most matters we followed the trend of our desires, which commonly ran in the direction of adventure—­it did not greatly matter what kind.  In pursuance of this policy of escapades, one bright Sunday morning Lieutenant Cobb, an aide-de-camp, and I mounted and set out to “seek our fortunes,” as the story books have it.  Striking into a road of which we knew nothing except that it led toward the river, we followed it for a mile or such a matter, when we found our advance interrupted by a considerable creek, which we must ford or go back.  We consulted a moment and then rode at it as hard as we could, possibly in the belief that a high momentum would act as it does in the instance of a skater passing over thin ice.  Cobb was fortunate enough to get across comparatively dry, but his hapless companion was utterly submerged.  The disaster was all the greater from my having on a resplendent new uniform, of which I had been pardonably vain.  Ah, what a gorgeous new uniform it never was again!