THE PHENOMENA OF DEATH IN BATTLE. 197 



the brain while kneeling at a spring to drink, who retained his 

 extraordinary attitude naturally in death. General Grant, when 

 appealed to, said that it could not be true, as he had never seen a 

 single instance where a soldier, shot dead, retained the posture 

 held in life, and his attention had never been called to it in the 

 war. General Sheridan stated that he had often seen it. I wrote 

 what I recalled of the Antietam scene thirty years after, and, never 

 having had a doubt raised but such things could be and were not 

 rare in war, I assumed the phenomenon to be fairly well estab- 

 lished, and that citation without proof would not tax the credulity 

 of readers. Yet the denial by General Grant caused me to ques- 

 tion my own senses or my memory. As against both Sherman 

 and Sheridan, the one sanguine and imaginative, the other impul- 

 sive and good-natured, it would seem that, all things being equal, 

 a question of fact would have the more competent judge in Grant. 

 General Grant went no further in his denial than to say that he 

 had never seen the phenomenon. There are veterans who, having 

 had the best of opportunities for seeing all phases of the battle- 

 field, not only say that they never saw a case of the kind, but, 

 resting upon professional knowledge, assert its impossibility. For 

 my own part, I can report only what I saw in my capacity as a 

 combatant that is, extraordinary attitudes of dead men on cer- 

 tain fields. Reports of comrades of analogous cases, and the quite 

 prevalent belief that the manifestation was possible, led to the 

 acceptance of it as a natural yet withal a rare occurrence. The 

 fact that military men, and more especially surgeons who have 

 been on the field, are skeptical on the point, that such phenomena 

 are comparatively rare, and that scientific observations have been 

 recorded in but few instances, makes the subject one for extreme 

 caution and conservatism in treatment. In my paper on wounded 

 soldiers I cited the cases of officers killed while leading the charge, 

 who in death held their sword-arms out as when last seen in life. 

 The inference drawn was that death must have been instanta- 

 neous. The Antietam scene described was of similar character, 

 yet extraordinary in the number of examples of the same order. 

 I confess that I did not see on any other of the score of fields 

 where I was present a scene at all comparable to that at Antietam, 

 but competent witnesses have reported similar things on other 

 fields, as well as on different parts of that field. 



The field of Antietam was peculiarly favorable for the devel- 

 opment of the phenomenon, which for brevity, borrowing a term 

 from Surgeon Brinton's record of research, I will call battlefield 

 rigor. It was the hardest fought battle in the East perhaps in 

 the whole country. The Confederates were at bay, with the Po- 

 tomac River behind them, and the Union soldiers were exultant 

 over the enemy's dilemma, and the fact that for once battle was 



