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for the infantry of twenty miles that day (the distance between
Mansfield and
Pleasant Hill), actually attacked a force of 25,000 men entrenched in line of battle.
That he was unsuccessful is not surprising.
The right wing, comprised of most of his infantry force, although in places they broke the line of entrenchments, and left many of their dead within the enemy's line, yet were repulsed, and so far as the attack on the right was concerned, it was unsuccessful; but the left-centre and left wing of the
Confederate line, composed of
Polignac's small division of infantry and the cavalry corps dismounted, under
General Tom Green, were not defeated or driven back; they drove their foes within the line of their entrenchments, and held them there, although not able to break it, and in that position night found them.
I retired from the field after dark to the hill on the road leading from
Mansfield to
Pleasant Hill, from which the Confederate batteries, it may be recollected, first opened fire, which position I had occupied all day and where my headquarters and servants were; and this statement, made with the positiveness of actual certainty, contradicts the statement of pursuit and defeat of the
Confederate troops.
Our army retired that night to where there was water, some eight miles in the rear, and there encamped.
I assent that General E. Kirby Smith, Commander-in-Chief of the Trans-Mississippi Department, who had ridden that day sixty miles from Shreveport, General Richard Taylor and myself, drank coffee together at my camp-fire, between eight and nine o'clock that night, and that the place was not more than eight hundred yards from the village of Pleasant Hill, and I thus contradict the assertion that the Confederate force were routed and driven from the field.
At about nine o'clock P. M., General Taylor ordered me “to return to the battlefield, picket up to the enemy's lines, and give him the earliest report of their movements in the morning.”
General Smith and General Taylor then returned to Mansfield, and I to the position I had occupied during the battle of the afternoon, with four companies of the First Texas cavalry, and threw out pickets up to the Federal lines.
The night was dark, and an occasional shot was fired by the pickets as late as ten o'clock. The noise and confusion in the Federal lines was noted — movement of wagons, felling of trees, denoting, as was thought, that the wounded from the battlefield were being sought for and carried into the hospitals.
Towards midnight all was quiet.
At dawn of
