Costing arms and legs

“The rebel wounded (sixty-eight) were carried to a house near by, all surgical operations necessary were performed by our surgeons, and then these wounded men were left in care of an officer and four men of the rebel prisoners, with a scanty supply of food, which was the best we could do for them.  In person I visited this house while the surgeons were at work, with arms and legs lying around loose, in the yard and on the porch; and in a room on a bed lay a pale, handsome young fellow, whose left arm had just been cut off near the shoulder.  Some one used my name, when he asked, in a feeble voice, if I were General Sherman.  He then announced himself as Captain Macbeth, whose battery had just been captured; and said that he remembered me when I used to visit his father’s house, in Charleston.  I inquired about his family, and enabled him to write a note to his mother, which was sent her afterward from Goldsboro’.” – William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman