Leander Stillwell

“I witnessed a pathetic incident, which is yet as fresh and vivid in my memory as if it had happened only yesterday. Soon after our arrival I procured a pass for a few hours, and took a stroll through the city. While thus engaged I met two hospital attendants carrying on a stretcher a wounded Union soldier. They halted as I approached, and rested the stretcher on the sidewalk. An old man was with them, apparently about sixty years old, of small stature and slight frame, and wearing the garb of a civilian. I stopped, and had a brief conversation with one of the stretcher-bearers. He told me that the soldier had been wounded in one of the recent assaults by the Union troops on the defenses of Vicksburg, and, with others of our wounded, had just arrived at Memphis on a hospital boat. That the old gentleman present was the father of the wounded boy, and having learned at his home in some northern State of his son being wounded, had started to Vicksburg to care for him; that the boat on which he was journeying had rounded in at the Memphis wharf next to the above mentioned hospital boat, and that he happened to see his son in the act of being carried ashore, and thereupon at once went to him, and was going with him to a hospital in the city. But the boy was dying, and that was the cause of the halt made by the stretcher-bearers. The soldier was quite young, seemingly not more than eighteen years old. He had an orange, which his father had given him, tightly gripped in his right hand, which was lying across his breast. But, poor boy! it was manifest that that orange would never be tasted by him, as the glaze of death was then gathering on his eyes, and he was in a semi-unconscious condition. And the poor old father was fluttering around the stretcher, in an aimless, distracted manner, wanting to do something to help his boy—but the time had come when nothing could be done. While thus occupied I heard him say in a low, broken voice, "He is—the only boy—I have." This was on one of the principal streets of the city, and the sidewalks were thronged with people, soldiers and civilians, rushing to and fro on their various errands,—and what was happening at this stretcher excited no attention beyond careless, passing glances. A common soldier was dying,—that was all, nothing but "a leaf in the storm." But for some reason or other the incident impressed me most sadly and painfully. I didn't wait for the end, but hurried away,—tried to forget the scene, but couldn't.”
― Leander Stillwell, The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865