Except Lieutenant Berkeley’s little party all our forces had retired to the vicinity of the Fort for rest and rations, and we took up our solemn vigil over the “dark and bloody ground.” It was presently suggested that we go to the river, for although our battle had rolled to the very edge of the Bluff, none of our people had been quite there. We moved quietly along in the dark, soon coming on two men sitting beside a woods, and we crossed over, where we left one man as guard and passed on, finding next a handsomely caparisoned horse entangled in the thicket, which we concluded to be the one ridden by General Baker, and this we sent back by another of our men.
Reaching the bank we sat down to listen, and heard a man struggling out in the river, crying, “Help, help, or I shall drown.” The agonized voice of the despairing wretch, as it rang out over the broad water, amid the stillness and darkness of inevitable death, conveyed to the mind an image of the horror which must weigh upon the heart of one doomed knowingly to eternal death. We could hear his strangling effort as he spouted the gurgling water from his mouth, and then another cry for help, answered this time by a voice calling from the gloom beyond, “Hold up a little longer, we are coming.” The first impulse, dictated by the desperate and savage experiences of the day, was to open fire and drive off his rescuers, but a more humane feeling prevailed, and we quietly listened, soon dimly discerning the boat rapidly approaching the Virginia shore, and landing two or three hundred yards above us, where the Federals had been crossing all day.
The space of beach or shore from the foot of the bluff to the water’s edge is about sixty yards wide, and after crossing from the island, the Federals had to go down the river the two hundred or more yards to reach the road leading up on the bluff.
This space was still strewn with dead and wounded men waiting removal or burial, so that when we moved up towards the landing place we found it difficult, in the deep darkness prevailing under the bluff, to avoid stepping on the bodies—in fact we did this frequently—those with life still in them always giving us notice of it.
Approaching the landing I suggested to Lieutenant Berkeley that he hold his men while I went forward alone to reconnoiter, which he did, and I walked up to the mass of people gathered about the landing. It was so dark they could not distinguish me from their own men, and making the best investigation I could, I reported to Berkeley that there were 1,500 of them.