The Following is fictional and is part of a serial story I have been posting on my Blog. This is not an excerpt from a real book I made it all up. so sadly you can’t look it up. If by some weird twist there really is a book with this title I will gladly apologize and think of something else.
Excerpt from Visions in the Smoke: Strange and bizarre stories from the Civil War. By Jerry Richter. Published 1997.
It is from the battlefields of Tennessee that we find what can only be the most bizarre case of Friendly fire ever recorded.
Hell had frozen over that January morning and frost covered the ground like a blanket. The Union soldiers were huddled around their campfires trying to stay warm. There was a shout from William Gellervice who was serving his turn on watch.
He claimed that there was a ghost out on the battle field. It was coming for him he cried. Just the sound of foot steps crunching the frozen ground and a cloud of breath in mid-air leaving a trail of blood in it’s wake.
The captain and others came running to see this specter. But once they arrived all they saw was a fellow union soldier wounded and limping badly in his hand he carried a service pistol and he held it up pointed in the direction of Will Gellervice.
The soldier was yelling, “Stay back specter of hell. I sense your presence and can see your unholy breath.” He gestured to the to the newly arrived men, “Thank God that you have arrived can you not see this Specter floating in your midst?”
“There is no Specter,” proclaimed Captain John Stanley. “Only a fellow soldier in the fight for unity.” Both William Gellervice and the wounded man turned on him and said that he lied. Then they were reported to look right at each other and the sound of gun fire and death tore the quite of the frozen morning.
The wounded union Soldier was later identified as Lieutenant Thomas Brettsin the only survivor of a confederate ambush in the small nearby town of Antigone. The sad thing was that Tom’s original, wound was found to be minimal and he would have had every hope of living, if it had not been for the nervous tension that haunted the air on that January morning in 1863.
© This story and subsequent parts are my own original idea and are protected under United States copy right law.
C. O. Bonham 