" In the following
spring General Devens was promoted to the command of a division
of the Eleventh Corps. He was posted with his division of
4,000 men on the extreme right of the flank of Hooker's army,
which was attacked by 26,000 men under the great rebel leader,
Stonewall Jackson. General Devens was wounded by a musket
ball in the foot early in the day; but he kept the field,
making the most strenuous efforts to hold his men together
and stay the advance of the Confederates until his Corps was
almost completely enveloped by Jackson's force and, in the
language of General Walker, "was scattered like the stones
and timbers of a broken dam." He recovered from his wound
in time to take part in the campaign of 1864. His troops
were engaged on the first of June in the battle of Cold Harbor,
and carried the enemy's entrenched line with severe loss.
On the third of June, in an attack which General Walker characterizes
as one "which is never spoke of without awe and bated breath
by any one who participated in it," General Devens was carried
along the line on a stretcher, being so crippled by inflammatory
rheumatism that he could neither mount his horse nor stand
in his place.
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