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Updated: June 22, 2025
There was nothing more to be concealed, and accordingly Colonel Katterfeld ordered his regiment to open fire on Hilgard and on the hostile artillery entrenched before the town. Captain Lange lay with his nose pressed against the breastworks, carefully observing the effect of the fire through his field glasses.
Hilgard, in charge of the Coast Survey office, was struck by the official terseness of the communications he occasionally received from Winlock, and resolved to be his rival. They were expecting additions to their families about the same time, and had doubtless spoken of the subject. When Hilgard's arrived, he addressed a communication to Winlock in these terms: "Mine's a boy. What's yours?"
The decimated regiments of Wood's division stood like a wall before the ruins of Hilgard; they formed a rock against which the enemy's troops dashed themselves in vain. In this way Fowler's and Longworth's divisions succeeded in making a fair retreat, especially as the enemy's strength was beginning to become exhausted.
The enemy soon stopped this ineffective fire from his field-guns, however, and on the basis of careful observations made from a captive balloon behind Hilgard, the Japanese began using explosive shells in place of the shrapnel. The very first shots produced terrible devastation.
More cannon, more machine-guns, more ammunition-carts rushed up in mad haste; the batteries kept up a continual fire. The battle moved on farther to the front. The houses of Hilgard were all in flames; only the white top of the church-tower still projected above the ruins. On the right of the town one column after another marched past to the strains of regimental music.
The regiments came to a halt for a moment, but nothing further happened, except that the two searchlights beyond Hilgard kept their eyes fixed on the spot where the rockets had ascended. A dog barked in the town, but was choked off in the middle of a howl.
Thus died a real hero, and those were hard times when men of stout heart and iron courage were sorely needed. Opposite Hilgard, the center of the enemy's position in the Blue Mountains, trenches had been thrown up, and the 28th Militia Regiment had occupied them in the night of August 13th-14th.
I date my birth into the world of sweetness and light on one frosty morning in January, 1857, when I took my seat between two well-known mathematicians, before a blazing fire in the office of the "Nautical Almanac" at Cambridge, Mass. I had come on from Washington, armed with letters from Professor Henry and Mr. Hilgard, to seek a trial as an astronomical computer.
Remember Hilgard! were the words which accompanied every command at drill and in the encampments where our new army was being trained. The regiments waited impatiently for the moment when they would be led against the enemy, but we dared not again make the mistake of leading an unprepared army against such an experienced foe.
Although the American shells had already created a great deal of havoc in Hilgard, the walls of the houses offered considerable resistance to the hail of bullets from the shrapnels. The brigadier-general therefore sent orders to the battery stationed behind and to the right of the trenches to shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into Hilgard.
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