A truce to collect the dead.

[**The following takes place during the fighting in the Siege of Vicksburg, a battle in the American Civil War.**] >Again the 7th Mississippi Battalion was in the way of the Yankee advance. For the next eight hours there was no letup in the fighting that rolled all around the hills. Flags were shredded into rags, and the corpses of men walled up. Yankees were forced to simply lie down in “a hail storm of bullets, shot, and shell” and wait for a chance to crawl backward, while more cannonballs with burning fuses rolled down upon them. >Some Yankees survived the uphill rushes only to keel over dead of sunstroke. After three failed dashes, [Sherman](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/William-Tecumseh-Sherman.jpg) said, “This is murder; order those troops back.” This time [Grant](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg)’s casualties were 3,199, to just 500 or so for the Confederates – he had lost almost as many men in three days as he had in the previous three weeks. “This last attack only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever,” he admitted. There would be no more assaults. >For the next three days, Newton and the men of Jones County sat in their stifling trenches, kerchiefs over their faces, trying not to retch or faint from the stench of the putrefying dead, visible just yards away, bloated and sun blackened and crawling with white maggots. At last Grant and [Pemberton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/JCPembertonBLY.jpg) agreed to a truce to collect the dead. At 6:00 p.m. on May 25 men of both sides came out from their trenches, and for the next two hours they did the gruesome job of burying the dead, also pausing to trade news, greet old friends, swap coffee and tobacco, or search for kin fighting for the other side. Some men even played cards. “I saw my old chum, the friend of my boyhood, the best friend I ever had coming from the rebel works,” one man wrote. “…I had a long talk with him. He seems to be a staunch rebel. God save him.” _____________________________ **Source:** Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “The Swamp and the Citadel.” *The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy*. Anchor Books, 2010. 105-6. Print. ______________________________ **Further Reading:** [William Tecumseh Sherman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman) [Ulysses Simpson Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant) [John Clifford Pemberton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Pemberton) [Siege of Vicksburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vicksburg)