The Maine bugle ... campaign; 1-5 Jan. 1894-Oct. 1898 - Maine.gov

A MAN FROM MAINE. 69
blankets just where they had found themselves after the fight,
whether they had joined their own regiments or not. They lay
like corpses with their bronzed faces rigid in the slumber of
sheer exhaustion. To arouse them from their death-like sleep
they had to be rudely shaken, when with haggard eyes they
arose like beings summoned against their wills from much
needed rest.
The writer comes now to the relation of an episode as dread
as it was unexpected.
In the northeast angle of the fort was the reserve magazine.
It was a frame structure twenty by sixty feet and six feet high,
covered with eighteen feet or more of sand well turfed, and
contained probably thirteen thousand pounds of powder. It
made an artificial mound most inviting to a wearied soldier, and
after the fight Colonel Alden's One Hundred and Sixty-ninth
New York Regiment found itself near it. The members of this
regiment laid themselves there for rest. Two sailors who had
wandered into the fort, and who, it is said, had drunk of brandy
found in the hospital, were seen to enter the magazine. The
next moment the green mound blew up, killing some two hun-
dred Federal soldiers and some Confederates. The entire struct-
ure, with a dull, heavy sound that shook the surrounding
country, went up into the air like an immense water-spout, with
timbers, debris, and human forms flying against the sky. The
existence of telegraph-wires between a bomb-proof near this
magazine gave rise to the belief that it had been purposely
exploded from the opposite shore, but an official investigation
traced it to the sailors already mentioned.
The writer wishes to draw attention to the fact that Whiting
and Lamb, through staft'-officers, had requested to be taken back
to the fort after the battle. They would not have made this
request if they had known the magazine was to be exploded
the next morning. Certainly if the magazine was to have been
exploded they would have known it.
By a providential change of mind the life of General Ames
was spared from this catastrophe, as he had at one time after
the surrender decided to establish his headquarters for the rest