At the Utterance of “Spottsylvania”

From The Thirty-Second Maine Regiment of Infantry Volunteers: An Historical Sketch by Henry C. Houston of Co. C (Portland, ME: Press of Southworth Brothers, 1903), pp. 144-145:

The utterance of the single word “Spottsylvania” [sic] is enough to bring most clearly and vividly before out mental vision all the scenes of those long hours of restless and unremitting strife.At its sound, we can still plainly behold the piles of dead and wounded heaped about the “bloody angle”, where the tide of battle surged highest and most fiercely. We can still hear the deep and thunderous reverberations of that incessant musketry-firing which for so many hours rolled and pealed in one grand volume of sound, without an interval. We can still see the trees of the dense forest amid which the conflict was waged, all scarred, scathed and torn by the storm of flying missiles which swept through them. We remember the stout trunks, riven to fragments by the exploding shell, or literally hewn to pieces by the musket-balls, and cut down as if felled by the woodman’s axe.