“ [80] reason any of you escaped. However, after you had left, we gathered up your wounded and did the best we could for them, with the aid of your surgeons who remained upon the field. By the way, Buell, I must recount that affair. We were very short of entrenching tools, and so we utilized an old icehouse to bury those dead Yanks in. You know we constructed our icehouses, by sinking a pit into the ground deep enough to store the ice we needed; around the top we built a low wall and over that a roof, and when we filled them we used straw and chaff to pack the ice in. The icehouse I speak of was convenient and empty; so we took those dead Yanks and put them in the pit as close together as we could. There was over a hundred of them” (some of them must have been from the 16th N. Y. who were on our right and lost heavily). “I thought if they were all together they could keep each other company as they had in life. The matter had passed from my mind, when happening to pass by there on my way to Gettysburg with my command I chanced to see smoke coming out of that icehouse pit, and going to it I found it was on fire, and undoubtedly so from spontaneous combustion. The incident made an impression on my mind and I wrote home about it, describing it and saying that it was no use trying to whip the Yankees; that you could kill them and put them in an icehouse for a grave, and they would come to and set themselves on fire to keep warm. Our mail facilities not being good, some time afterward, lying wounded between the lines upon the Gettysburg field, I bethought me of that letter, and expecting to fall into the Yanks' hands, and believing they would search me and find the letter and reading it, not receive it well, I took it out and chewed it into paper wads and threw them away from me. A little while after ”
