We were a hardlooking lot. The smoke had blackened our faces, our lips and our throats so far down that it took a week to get the last of it out. The most dandified officer in the regiment looked like a coalheaver. But there was no time to be thinking about looks. Attention, battalion, forward march, came the order of Colonel Force again and away we went with a shout over the ghastly pile of Texans who had been laid along their line beyond the woods and the first thing I saw on the ground was the meerschaum which the Rebel officer had smoked during the fight. It was still warm as it lay where it had dropped from his mouth when he ran and I picked it up and took my turn at smoking it. In front of us was a bare ridge, and over this the Rebels were retiring in a bulging and shaky line; pelted by DeGolyers best shrapnel and pelted by the rifle fire of our Third Brigade boys. The affair on the Raymond Road was over. There was a dinner in the town hall at Raymond which the ladies of the town had got ready to refresh the Johnnies on their return from the fight. But the Johnnies hadnt time to indulge at the time of their return. In fact, they had gone a good distance beyond the town without stopping before the good people of Raymond understood the strategic move which was in progress. The dinner was quite as useful to the Yankees who had time to eat it as it would have been to the Rebs. Image: Lt. Henry Dwight was a soldier as well as an amateur artist. His popular pen and ink drawing A Question of Right of Way - 20th Ohio vs. 7th Texas depicts a soldier during the Battle of Raymond with an old meerschaum pipe in his mouth. Lt. Henry O. Dwight 20th Ohio Infantry The Affair on the Raymond Road Account published in The New York Semi-Weekly Tribune in 1886
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:18:06 +0000
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