This is a terrific account of the battle of Atlanta. I have done some research on the 9th Battalion Georgia Artillery. Peter Paul Noel D'Algivney was the company surgeon when the soldiers camped in Atlanta. I first found this at Emory University and later online with the link below. It is a good piece of Atlanta History.

My 80 Years in Atlanta by Sara Huff
http://www.artery.org/UpperArtery/CivilWar/SaraHuff.html

It was on July the 22, the day after we left home because the fighting was so near, that my younger brother John's keen ears caught the sound of distant firing (Battle of Atlanta).

Before that fiery July sun had set, thousands of as brave men as ever joined battle, were numbered among the dead. And I saw thousands more brought into the city in ominous black covered ambulances which made their slow, pain-laden way up Decatur Street to several improvised hospitals where Dr. Noe D'Alvigny and Dr. Logan, as well as many of Atlanta's most prominent ladies, waited to try to ease their suffering.

As the battle, raging to the east and southeast of us, grew more fierce, the line of ambulances creeping up Decatur street increased. The dismal-looking vehicles had their side curtains lifted to let in the air, for the heat was intense.

We could see from our viewpoint, in front of the old-time residence of Charles Shearer Sr., the blood trickling down from the wounds of the poor helpless victims of one of the war's most terrible battles.

Men were clinging to sides of the hospital vans trying to fan away the terrible swarms of flies which hovered over the wounded, My young brother John went into action, as he usually did when he saw a chance to be helpful. Noticing that a fly brush had just fallen from the hands of a man on one of the ambulances, and had been crushed by the heavy wheels, he grabbed the slit-paper fly brush that mother handed him, and leaping to the side of the slow-moving ambulance, became one of the most efficient fly fanners in the procession. He was less than 12 years of age.

On one of the wagons sat a priest comforting a dying soldier. Later on this same man of God aided Dr. D'Alvigny in saving the churches and the Medical College.

The next day, mother, being uneasy about father's brother, Wilson Huff, whom she thought was in the fight, but was already a prisoner, and later died at Camp Chase, Ohio, took John and me and black mammy with her and walked out to the battlefield to hunt Uncle Wilson. But he had been captured at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and was never heard of until his captain, who had been a captive at Camp Chase, Ohio, returned to his home months after the war was over and told how he had seen Wilson carried to the smallpox hospital and had heard him singing, as the van moved slowly' through Camp Chase, "I'm But a Stranger Here, Heaven Is My Home!" He was one of the seven sons that grandmother had in the war, and one of the three who never returned.

In company with us that day on the battlefield was an elderly couple looking for their son. They were about to come away when we saw a temporary burial going on in a nearby thicket. Their soldier boy was being put under the ground.

When mother and the rest of us walked over the battlefield of July 22 on the day after it was fought over, the ground looked as though it had been plowed up,and it was literally red with blood that had been spilled there the day before.

During the battle the bullets fell thickly in the yard of 'the Atlanta Medical College where Dr. D'Alvigny was operating. His daughter, Pauline D'Alvigny Campbell, who was assisting her father, narrowly escaped being hit several times, since on account of the intense heat the operating table had been carried out into the shade of several nearby trees. Now it was hurriedly carried in. Pauline picked up some of the bullets, and showed them to me fifty years later, shortly before her death. She and my mother were lifetime friends.

My eyes have watched the path of a shell as it stretched like a shining thread across the war clouds hanging over the city of Atlanta in the summer of 1864. Fireworks of later years have in exposition displays reminded me of the dramatic night scenes of my war-time childhood. Rockets seem to curve in their course, while a shell moves on as evenly as did Lindbergh as I watched him sail into Atlanta.

From the open window of my mother's borrowed house on Railroad Street, just west of Decatur Street, I watched the distant fighting and heard the scream' of shells and crash of cannon. The, house was directly behind the home of our benefactor and host, Mr. Charlie Shearer, one of the city's finest old-time English gentlemen. He and his noble wife had invited us to stay there, and we had accepted the invitation after many weeks.

Yes, from the open window I as a child Iay in bed with another member of the family, and watched a scene more spectacular than has been witnessed here by any child since that tragic display of shell fire. The cottage was in line of the firing in the forts on the north and the east of the city. I saw what happened when the guns were turned on the Washington street churches, on the Courthouse, which stood where stands the State Capitol on Peters great flouring mill and on the locomotives plying up and down the tracks through the Georgia Railroad switch yard.

My mother, not being in her own home, had no bombproof in her yard to shelter us from the shellstorm. But when the danger became real she and her family followed the neighbors into the rock walled basement of the Richard Peters' flouring mill on the other side of the railroad from our refugee home.

The more furious the firing the bigger the crowd in the basement. There was no such a thing as a stranger, there never was in war-time, and I remember how the men and boys tried to rattle each other about the way they had reacted to a shriekng bombshell. Like an electric storm going over, the shelling seldom lasted more than an hour or so, and the people then went home and put the children to bed.

The experience of having one's house hit by a bomb is not very different from having it struck by lightning. Our house of refuge was partly torn to pieces one night while we were in the mill basement, and Huff House had been struck by lighting.

Conditions grew so unbearable that mother decided to try to get back home, but everything was against that. The enemy was in possession. Turning southwest, she planned to go to some of her Utoy Church friends. She mrade her way to the oId home of Mr. and Mrs. William White. They were gone and the officer who was staying in their house insisted on her coming in out of the rainstorm, but she sat in her buggy the hole night long, her children and Charlotte's little darkey asleep around her. Older brother minded the horse and the mules. John and Charlotte were in charge of the cows. Geting frightened at the picket firing close by, the cows both broke loose and ran away. Mother thought them gone forever, but strange freak of good fortune she recovered one of them. From a distance of not less than seven miles the wise, home loving bovine found her way back to her own green pasture on Woodall Creek.

After returning from ref ugeeing -mother bought butter from an old man she had known for many years. After several weeks she accidentally found out, what the cunning old thief knew from the first: she was buying her own cow's butter. A well-known judge, father of a very prominent Atlanta family, forced that man to give mother's cow back to her and would not let her pay a cent in court cost.

Trying to get out of the shell-infested danger zone, and failing in every effort, mother returned to the Railroad Street cottage, behind the Shearer home. A letter to my father happened to reach him in Virginia. One man in his company was due a furlough. The captain gave it to him. He had a hard time getting into the city. Atlanta was by that time almost surrounded by General Sherman's army. Father had left his horse at grandmother's in Newton County, and had come on foot in order to try to slip through the lines at night. He said he found that a hard thing to do, and only on the second night could he find a slipping place.

When he found out the dire danger his family was in he put forth every effort to get us out and on our way to his relatives, Newton and Walton County citizens. He could trust them to take care of us. His furlough being for only a very few days, he could carry us only as far as Conyers, Ga. Some of his kin carried him to Covington to get his horse, and most kindly took care of us for three weeks, when other refugee relatives arrived, and mother gladly and gratefully accepted the invitation of our dear old great uncle, near Social Circle, Ga.