[The following takes place following the American Civil War Battle of Corinth.]
In the ditch before Robinett [a Union battery position], Union soldiers found the corpse of Rogers [Colonel William P. Rogers of the 2nd Texas, who led the charge]. They propped him up for a photo, his eyes open and staring at the sky, his beard and face blacked with powder, his coat torn open, and his sleeves pushed up, businesslike, to the elbows. A young Iowa infantryman counted fifty-four other forms in the ditch with Rogers, including a regimental chaplain, a boy no more than fifteen, and Rogers’s horse.
Soldiers wandering the fields came across odd, spectral images. A conical shell was embedded in the center of one of the huge oak trees sheltering Robinett; it had almost passed through the trunk, but not quite, its point just showing on the other side. In some sun-baked parts of the battlefield, bodies had turned black from the heat and gunpowder.
In another place, someone had lifted a stiff-dead Union soldier and braced him against a tree, his gun in hand, as at parade rest.
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Corinth.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 35-6. Print.
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