I was played out and fell asleep on my horse and it was daylight when I got awake. Not a soul in sight and I did not know which way to go to camp. Was lost just as much as ever, and while I was musing which way I should go, our bugler came along and he was lost as well as I. We held a consultation, then started toward a field where some hospital tents were. They had just begun to take them down when they were attacked. We had to take to the woods again but got home to camp about two o'clock P.M. Some did not get in until evening and some not at all. My brother was one of them. He was captured and taken to Bell Island, then to Libby Prison at Richmond, Virginia; then to Sarrsbury [Salisbury?], North Carolina; from there to Andersonville, Georgia, where they were nearly starved to death. He came home several days after the war was over. Only two out of every three prisoners returned home. He only lived a little while and it would have been better to be killed outright.

We stayed in camp a little while and did some picket duty. Then we started on Bellfield Raid, which took us five days. Had more or less fighting every day. We started with three rations; that is all the cavalry got no matter how long they stayed out. We had to live on what we could capture, or rather steal. Unfortunately, this part of the country had been raided before. We were in the front and the infantry behind, tearing up railroads and burning ties and heating and warping the rails.

The first day we crossed the river and lay there all night. Adam Shelly's horse stumbled and tossed him into the river. When he came up, he had his mouth full of water and he hissed and blubbered at us when we laughed at him.

We had to ford the river and found a larger force opposing us that we had anticipated. We got all tangled up and had to retreat back across the river. Next morning, we got reinforcements and tried again and made it. We found two of our men on the bank with their throats cut. I suppose they got sick or were too tired to retreat and were caught by the Rebs. We moved out, but the leather straps on our packhorses were rotten, and the provisions they were carrying kept spilling on the ground. We found a fine carriage at a farm and loaded it full of stuff from the horses. Of course we lived on small rations but something helped us on a little. We got some dried corn at a nigger hut and we also caught a goose and carried her a night and a day till we could build a fire to cook her. Stopped at a place to feed and we just put the water on for coffee and the water was merely boiling when the Rebs began shelling us. We had to move fast with no coffee and a raw goose. We were real hungry and ate most of it raw and gave the rest away, so none of it was wasted. We burned lots of things on this trip, as we could not bring it along.

One night we lay where two rivers come together at a point. We got there after night and were not allowed to take anything off our horses, so we laid down beside them with a strap in our hands to hold them so we could mount in a hurry and skedaddle if the Rebs came. It rained and snowed all night and when daylight came we began to fall back. With all the rain, the river got much higher than when we crossed it, so they built a pontoon bridge of wood for us to cross over on. When we got over, they chipped the bridge loose and it went down with the high water. Then we heard the Rebs shooting. They were shooting at about eighty of our men in the woods, and this was unbeknown to us when we cut the bridge loose. They could not cross over and the Rebs got every last one of them.

Later, we dismounted and sent the horses back and scattered along the swamp. There was a high railroad embankment there and me and George Stahl were sent to the other side to watch for Johnnies. We stayed for about two hours and the firing had ceased, so we climbed back over the embankment and we found all our men gone and it was full of Rebs marching up towards the woods. We ran about two Virginia miles till we caught up with some of our dismounted men. They were cutting down some trees to put across the road to barricade it. We stayed there a while and helped them and then, real tired boys, we made it back to our horses and it was the last we saw of the Rebs on that trip. We were so tired from our long run but were happy the Rebs didn't have two more prisoners.