Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1896 — HORRORS OF WAR. [ARTICLE]

HORRORS OF WAR.

Bcenes Among Women, Children and Wounded After'Battle. Shepherdstown lies near a bed in the Potomac river not far from Harper’s Ferry, Martinsburg, Antietam and other places made historic by the civil war. , It iiei in the midst of the region wheye the hardest and bloodiest fighting of 1863 was done and, especially the Antietam battle,

was a scene of horrors. The village had been turned into hospitals where the wounded were cared for and a woman who was a nurse in one of these thus describes tne scenes witnessed in the village after McClellan put Lee to flight at Antietam: “The Confederate army was in full retreat. Lee had crossed the Potomac under cover of the darkness and when morning oslue the greater part of his force had gone on toward Kearneysville. McClellan followed to the river and without crossing got a battery in position on Douglas Hill and began to, shell the retreating army and, in consequence, the town. Panic instantly seized the people. The danger was less than it seemed, for McClellan was not bombarding the town, but the army, and most of the shells flew over us und exploded in the fields. The better people kept some outward coolness, but the poorer classes acted as if the town were already in a blaze, and rushed from their houses with their families and household goods to make their way into the country. The road was thronged, the streets blocked, men were vociferating, women crying, children screaming, wagons, ambulances, guns, caissons, horsemen, footmen, all mingled—nay, even wedged and jammed together—in one struggling, shouting mass. It was pandemonium. The negroes were the worst, and with faces of a ghstetly ash-color, and staring eyes, they swarmed into the fields, carrying their babies, their clothes, their pots and kettles, fleeing from the wrath behind them.

“Had this been all, we could afford to laugh now, but there was another side, to 1 the picture that lent it an intensely painful aspect. It was the hurrying crowds of wounded. Ah me! those maimed and bleeding fugitives! When the firing commenced the hospitals began to empty. All who were able to pull one foot after another, or could bribe or bee comrades to carry them, left in haste. In vain we implored them to stay; in vain we showed them the folly, the suicide, of the attempt; in vain we argued, cajoled, threatened, ridiculed, pointeu out that we were remaining and that there was less danger here than on the road'. There is no sense or reason in a panic. The cannon were bellowing upon Douglas Hill, the shells whistling and shrieking, the air full of shouts and cries; we had to scream to make ourselves heard. The men replied that the ‘Yankees’ were crossing; that the town was to be burned; that we could not be made prisoners, but they could; that, anyhow, they were going as far as they could walk, or be carried. And go they did, hut how? “Men with cloths about their heads went hatless in the sun, men with cloths about their feet limped shoeless on the stony road; men with arms in slings, without arms, with one leg, with bandaged sides and backs; men in ambulances, wagons, carts, wheelbarrows, men carried on stretchers, or supported on the shoulder of some self-denying comrade —all who could crawl went, and went to almost certain death. They could not go far, they dropped off into the country houses, where they were received with as much kindness as it was possible to ask for; but their wounds had become inflamed and angry, their frames were weakened by fright and over-exertion; erysipelas, mortification, gangrene set in; and the long rows of nameless graves still bear witness to the results.”