Iron Nerve of a Soldier

Transcribed by Larry Stevens

In the charge at Ruff's Mills, Georgia, in which the 27th Ohio participated, I was wounded and while lying under a tent fly, awaiting attention from the surgeons, I saw under the same fly an improvised Surgeon's table and on this table was a man who had been shot through the leg. He was a member of Company B of the same Regiment. The wounded soldier who was a German, refused to take an anasthetic and the doctors and soldiers who were attending him were compelled to continually push his body back on the table, as he attempted to rise, evidently to see what the surgeons were doing. After the operation was completed and the stump was tied up, the wounded man, who as it happened, had been formerly a cooper, sat up on the table, threw his legs over the side and jumped off, alighting on his one good leg. Swinging the other, he exclaimed, "Py Golly, I can make parrels yet."
This happening impressed itself vividly on my mind, but I did not see him again until thirty-four years after the war at which time I was driving down Naghten Street in the city of Columbus, when I saw a peg legged soldier plodding along the sidewalk going in the same direction. I drove to the curb and took the old soldier in to give him a lift. Tapping the wooden peg leg as the soldier sat on the seat beside me I asked, "Where did you loose your good leg?" "At Ruff's Mills, Georgia, July 4th, 1864," was the answer. I looked him in the face a moment and recognized the wounded soldier. It was George Evercourt that I had seen jump off the table under the tent fly, not deploring the loss of his leg, but exulting that he was still able to make barrels and I said to him, "Well, I saw the surgeon cut it off." George Evercourt of Company B died March 20th, 1908.

By: H.C. Evans, Company C, Twenty-seventh Ohio Veteran Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

From: The History of Fuller's Ohio Brigade 1861-1865
By: Charles H. Smith, Major, 27th Ohio Regiment, Veteran Volunteer Infantry. Cleveland, Ohio 1909.

Web Publishing Copyright © 1995 Larry Stevens

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Last updated September 1 1995