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I was at a tactical in a place called 'Rouzerville' in PA. I was part of a unit hung out on the left. We had a great concealed view of the main field below where it was hoped to draw the Yanks in. It looked like a sweet set up except that there was only about 30-50 (I forget exactly) of us.(out of 200. There was closer to 350 of them, about typical odds) Only one thing. We were bait. They forgot to mention that part to us.

One of out pickets (the only one the Yanks coming in on our flank failed to snatch up) came running flat out behind our lines baying "BLUES!" over and over like a hound dog. He also kept right on going. About that time about 100 Yanks crashed in through the trees, formed a rough line of battle and poured a one two (front rank second rank) volley into us. Pandemonium! Chaos!! Panic!!! THIS is what they meant by "FLANKED!" It was not a pleasant experience.

The following morning, it was bitterly cold and the air was dead calm. We were in the bottom of a small valley and the smoke just settled to the ground and lay there. At one point I realized that, literally, all that could be seen was the flash of the enemy's muskets. There would be the sudden 'blossom' of red flower
surrounded by a bright white ring of smoke against the duller white background. We used the smoke to shift right leaving every third man to keep up the fire, then ran past the Yanks to take the high hill they had abandoned when we would not make a hopeless attack against it. From that vantage we could see the smoke hanging in three distinct and separate layers.

Last was an unpleasant but educational experience. We (the Rebs) were staging a fighting retreat thro ugh an orchard to home base for the tactical's end. The Yanks had spread their line stretching us thin. Our "line of battle" was literally set up in "comerades of battle" skirmish order. The idea was to retreat up the hill consolidating our lines as the slope closed us in. Didn't work. The Yanks had divided their force into supporting columns. They advanced as was done in the Wilderness. The front ranks of the columns woud fire, step aside letting their column sweep by them as they reloaded to fall in at the end to do it all over. They thereby kept constantly moving columns of fire preventing us from setting up, forcing us to keep falling back. A couple times we tried to form against them, they were able to pull the two neighboring columns in to create a stronger force than we could face. All we could do was shoot and move, move, move, shoot and move. I got that cold feeling, that knowing, that nothing I could do, nothing we could do would stop them. In that moment, I felt I knew some little bit of how a late war Reb must have felt. It was not at all pleasant.