Those who were too severely wounded to get off the field on their own faced a grim ordeal.' Oh it was horrible,' Richard Ackerman remembered, 'lying there with dead, dying and wounded all around, and to hear their heart-rending groans:'Few Southern soldiers who witnessed the carnage above Young's Branch would ever forget the sight. L.D. Hill of the 4th Texas, whose regiment arrived as the Zouave line gave way, recalled, 'I never saw more dead men on the same space of ground on any battle field of the war.' South Carolina artillery Captain William K. Bachman noted, 'The ground was covered with the dead red-breeched fellows so that I actually had to pilot the drivers through the bodies, sometimes stopping to move them out of the way.'

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Some Confederates paused to pillage the dead and wounded Yankees. 'You won't live anyhow,' one Southerner told Private James Patterson,'so I guess I'll take what you've got.' Patterson begged the man to fill his canteen, but the Rebel refused. Waving $2 he took from Patterson's pocket, the Confederate said, 'We are going toWashington and I will not fail to drink your health when I get there!'

Another Confederate approached Private James Sheridan, who had been struck down in the retreat by a bullet that entered just above his right hip and angled up to the breastbone. When Sheridan asked the Rebel for help, the man snarled, 'I've got a good mind to put you out of your misery by running my bayonet through you.'

William Walker lay half submerged in Young's Branch for nearly 24 hours before a group of enemy soldiers finally heeded his pleas and dragged him onto the bank. Virtually shot to pieces with six wounds, Frederick Fowler sprawled in a muddy hollow, unable to move. Two barefoot Rebel soldiers came up to him, remarking, 'We'll lift you out in exchange for your boots.' Fowler gladly accepted the exchange.

Not all Confederates behaved in such a callous fashion. Some passing Southerners covered grievously wounded Lieutenant Edward Wright with a blanket, made a pillow for his head and gave him a drink of water. 'Although I did not sleep much that night, I managed to live till morning,' Wright wrote. 'It commenced raining, and after waiting until I was nearly wet through, I asked an old Texan to take me to a hospital, which he kindly consented to do.' There a surgeon removed the bullet from Wright's back, and two days later he walked through the lines to Centreville. But infection claimed his life in an Alexandria hospital on September 25.

Those who remained alive battled pain and exhaustion as their comrades weakened and died around them. Private Levi Pond had been shot in the right thigh and groin by a bullet that 'cut the scrotum so the testicle hung out.' As if this were not bad enough, Pond was suffering from 'the Chickahominy diarrhea' with '16 or 17 passages a day'.

Meanwhile, wounded through the head, blinded and paralyzed but not sensing any pain, Corporal George Huntsman faded in and out of consciousness, insisting to those who lay near him that he was unscathed and wanted to go home. He was eventually taken to a hospital in Alexandria, where he died four days after the battle.

Theodore Hart was determined to survive despite the terrible wound that had shattered his jaw and put out an eye. 'To have lain around on the bare ground four or five nights and days, two of the nights under a drenching rain, I hardly know how I managed to stick it through,' he later wrote his mother. 'All I had to subsist on [was] just a little meat broth and a cup of tea.' Some men lay where they had fallen for two days, many for five, and at least one manSergeant George Sinclair of Company Efor eight days before being evacuated through the lines to Fairfax Court House.

Two days after the battle, regimental Chaplain Gordon Winslow and 10 Zouaves returned to the field under a flag o truce to do what they could for the wounded. The party was accompanied by Adjutant Sovereign's father, who served as chaplain of the 5th New Jersey. He discovered his son's naked body and buried the boy with his own hands.

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