in mud up to their thighs and under a murderous fire to get their guns out.
Many a man had been killed tugging at trail or wheel when the day was
against them; but not a gun had ever been lost. At last the evil day arrived.
At Winchester a sudden and impetuous charge for a while swept everything
before it, and carried the knoll where the old battery was posted;
but all the guns were got out by the toiling and rapidly dropping men,
except the Cat, which was captured with its entire detachment working at it
until they were surrounded and knocked from the piece by cavalrymen.
Most of the men who were not killed were retaken before the day was over,
with many guns; but the Cat was lost. She remained in the enemy's hands
and probably was being turned against her old comrades and lovers.
The company was inconsolable. The death of comrades was too natural
and common a thing to depress the men beyond what such occurrences
necessarily did; but to lose a gun! It was like losing the old Colonel;
it was worse: a gun was ranked as a brigadier; and the Cat was equal
to a major-general. The other guns seemed lost without her;
the Eagle especially, which generally went next to her, appeared to the men
to have a lonely and subdued air. The battery was no longer the same:
it seemed broken and depleted, shrunken to a mere section.
It was worse than Cold Harbor, where over half the men were killed or wounded.
The old Captain, now Colonel of the battalion, appreciated the loss
and apprehended its effect on the men as much as they themselves did,
and application was made for a gun to take the place of the lost piece;
but there was none to be had, as the men said they had known all along.
It was added -- perhaps by a department clerk -- that if they wanted a gun
to take the place of the one they had lost, they had better capture it.
"By ----, we will," they said -- adding epithets, intended for
the department clerk in his "bomb-proof", not to be printed in this record --
and they did. For some time afterwards in every engagement into which
they got there used to be speculation among them as to whether the Cat