With the 45th Illinois After Shiloh-- Part 2: Burial Detail Plied with Whiskey

"On Tuesday I was detailed with others to bury the dead lying within our camp and a distance of  two hundred yards in advance.  I had charge of digging the grave, if a trench over sixty feet long and four feet deep, can be called a grave.

"The weather was hot, and most of the dead had been killed early Sunday morning, and dissolution had already commenced.  The soldiers gatherd the bodies up and placed them in wagons, hauling them near the trench, and piling them up like cord wood.

"We were furnished with plenty of whiskey, and the boys believed that it would have been impossible to have performed the job without it.

"When the grave was ready, we placed the bodies  therein, two deep; the father, brother, husband and lover, all lie till Gabriel's trumpet shall sound.  All the monument to those brave men was a board nailed to a tree at the head of the trench, upon which I cut with my pocket knife, the words: '125 rebels.' 

--Old Secesh