GDG- Kirkpatrick's Battery

[dwmadison at comcast.net]

July 2.  This morning on getting up, I saw a sight which was perfectly sickening and heart-rending in the extreme.  It would have satiated the most blood-thirsty and cruel man on God's earth.  There were [with]in a few feet of us, by actual count, seventy-nine (79) North Carolinians laying dead in a straight line.  I stood on their right and looked down their line.  It was perfectly dressed.  three had fallen to the front, the rest had fallen backward; yet the feet of all these dead men were in a perfectly straight line.  Great God!  When will this horrid war stop?  This regiment belonged to [Brig. Gen. Alfred] Iverson's Brigade, and had been pushed forward between two stone fences, behind which the Yanks were laying concealed.  They had all evidently been killed by one volley of musketry and they had fallen in their tracks without a single struggle.

>From Four Years in the Confederate Artillery The Diary of  Private Henry Berkeley.

Dennis in Richmond