APPENDIX. 7^ 113 collected between 4,000 and 5,000 stragglers and sent them into camp. What had become of the command of the army no one knew. By some persons it was reported that Alajor- General Gustavus AV. Smith had succeeded Johnston, by others, that President Davis in person had taken the reins of the army. General Johnston himself was supposed to be either actually dead or dying. He had been twice hit before he received the final wound which struck him from his horse. In falling he had broken two of his ribs, was picked up senseless and covered with blood, put into a hackney coach and driven to a house on Church Hill, where, he lay between life and death for several weeks. The roads in the vicinity were covered with tan and all traffic interrupted by chains stretched across them near the house which he occupied. Had I been aware on that day of the actual state of things upon the field, I might easily have driven in a carriage through the confederate lines directly into our own camps. It was not indeed till several days after the battle that anything like military order was restored throughout the confederate positions, or the last of the wounded brought in from the recesses of the woods and the intricacies of the secluded pathways in which they had lain dying a hundred deaths within four or five miles of the city and its hospitals. It is impossible to exaggerate the difficulties attending a general action in such a country. One gentleman who distinguished himself by his assiduity m seeking and bringing in the wounded from the field, told me that on three different occasions, within as many days, he had been forced to pass by wounded men, his carriage being absolutely filled and he walking by its side, that on each occasion he had noted as well as he could the position of the sufferers, and that on each occasion when he returned to seek for them he was compelled to give up the search in despair, so absolutely impossible was it to identify particular paths in that labyrinth of swamps and trees. 8
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