Here’s another installment of my on-going series, “Shot in
the [blank],” a series about soldiers from the Army of the
Potomac who received gunshot wounds to uncommon pieces of their anatomy. Today,
we’re going to explore a neck wound.
Neck wounds are horrifying things. They emit lots of blood, they disable their victims through asphyxiation, and they take away any means of communicating
the nature of their injury. In essence, sufferers of neck wounds lose their breath and their voice in one cruel
blow.
For our story today, a bizarre quirk of fate happened whereby
a soldier’s neck wound saved his life. Had this federal soldier been able to speak normally, he would likely have been killed by his Confederate
captor.
The unfortunate soldier in question—the one who received an awful neck
wound—was Sergeant Franklin H. Evans, Company E, 121st Pennsylvania. He
received his injury on July 1, 1863, just as his regiment commenced combat with Confederate infantry at the south
end of McPherson’s Ridge, an acclivity west of Gettysburg. At 2 P.M., Brig. General Abner Perrin’s South Carolina
brigade surged against the left end of the Union 1st Corps. This was where the 121st Pennsylvania held the line.
Evans was among the first soldiers o fall. The commanding officer of the 121st Pennsylvania, Major Alexander Biddle,
had just given orders to his men, telling them to rise up from the tall grass and volley into the
attacking Confederates. Obediently, Evans rose to one knee and cocked his rifle. Before he could
pull the trigger, a minié ball struck him in the neck. The ball whizzed through
him. It entered one side of his neck and came out the other. Evans recalled the sensation. He
wrote, “When the bullet struck me, it jarred my body as a blow on the neck with
a fist. I felt it enter my neck but I did not feel it go out, so I thought it
was still [in] there.”
Knowing his wound might be dangerous—perhaps even mortal—Evans rose to his
feet and started hobbling to the rear, a desperate bid to get out of the danger zone. After traveling only 100 yards, he
collapsed, unable to move. He tried calling for help, but to his horror, discovered he could
not speak. The shock of the blow and the blood filling his trachea made it
impossible to talk. Closing his mouth, he focused on breathing through his
nose. In a few minutes, a wounded private from his company—his tent-mate, in
fact—came along, holding his mangled arm. Seeing Evans prostrate and bleeding,
the soldier—Private Harry Gouldy—urged Evans to endure the pain and “come out
of this.” Evans shook his head. Choking and weary, Evans felt his life slipping
away. It was an odd sensation. He remembered:
I had difficulty breathing. The affairs of this world seemed
to lose their importance. I had a dim thought that mother would be sorry. I
ceased to care which way the victory went. My thoughts were concentrated on the
hereafter; I wanted to see how it went to die.
Evans fainted. He awoke several hours later, long after the
battle had passed over him. It was two hours to sunset, so he must have been
unconscious for nearly three hours. Evans first laid eyes on a nearby fence, and concluded rather
matter-of-factly that he must be alive. He wrote, “I had never heard that
fences were used in Paradise, and as I knew they were used on earth, I
concluded that, at any rate, I was not dead yet.” Within a few minutes, a plump
fifteen-year-old Confederate straggler came by and asked Evans if he could
offer any assistance. Evans begged for water, trading his penknife for a generous swig from the
teenager’s canteen. The water stimulated Evans, and it returned his
voice, though it remained weak. More importantly, Evans vowed to live on. He
wrote, “I had changed my mind about dying.”
After the helpful Confederate straggler passed by,
another gray-clad soldier arrived. This one had a mean look on his face. Evans
called him “a devil of the Wilkes Booth type, only infinitely worse,” a man who
looked “like Mephistopheles in Faust.” According to Evans, the Confederate
soldier readied his weapon, eager to execute him at the first
sign of provocation.
Hoping to get Evans to say something derogatory against the
Confederacy, the “Wilkes Booth”-looking Confederate asked, “Ain’t you ashamed
of yourself, coming down here to drive us from our homes?” Under normal
circumstances, Evans might have retorted with disdain or sarcasm, pointing out the
Confederate soldier’s idiocy. They were in
Pennsylvania! But as Evans later
explained, had he attempted to answer flippantly, it would have provoked the Confederate to evil
mischief. He reflected, it would have “called forth his missing courage to
deliver the fatal cut and leave one more [Yankee] to be reported as ‘killed in action;’
when the truth would have been ‘murdered’—murdered by a cowardly, cold-hearted,
blood-thirsty villain.”
Evans’s neck wound prevented him from blurting out a hasty rejoinder. He could
not answer because he could barely speak. He mumbled, “I don’t know.” Furious
that Evans would not take the bait, the
Confederate launched into a tirade, demanding an answer to his question. Why had the Yankees invaded his country?
Again, Evans replied, “I don’t know; I don’t care to talk politics with a bullet
through my throat.” The Confederate snarled, asking Evans if the bullet really
was lodged in his neck. Evans nodded. The Confederate soldier kicked him in
his cartridge box, boasting how his army had enough bullets to kill all
the Yankees, and soon they’d whip the Army of the Potomac permanently. Unable to
get Evans to debate with him, the vicious-looking straggler fetched two members
from the Confederate ambulance corps, who, in turn, moved Evans to an aide
station where the Confederates had collected other wounded prisoners. Evans was
relieved to be rid of his captor. Through silence, he remembered, “I had
escaped the tiger’s jaws.”
No Confederate medical personnel operated on Evans, even
though he insisted the bullet was still inside him. (Only hours later did Evans
discover his error. He found an exit wound, proof the bullet had passed clean through.) The
next day, July 2, Evans reached a field hospital, although he had to beg a gray-clad staff officer to take him there. (I’m not sure to which farm he journeyed,
but I would guess he stayed at the Harman or Bream farms; however, I would not stake money on it.) He slept along a
fence, and on July 3, he reported to the surgeon-in-charge. The farmhouse
contained six to eight wounded Union soldiers, but the Confederates did not
operate on any of them. A sergeant with a shattered ankle even begged to have his
leg cut off, but the Confederates ignored him. They were “working like bees,” Evans
remembered, “cutting off the limbs of their own wounded.” On July 4, a
Confederate provost asked if any of the Union prisoners were able to walk. None
of them admitted to it. Frustrated that he could not carry off any more prisoners, the provost vacated the hospital. The next day, the Confederates abandoned the area,
leaving the Union wounded behind. As Evans recalled, he felt a “happy sensation” watching the last few Confederates gallop down the Fairfield Road, trailing
after their beaten army. In a few hours, he and the other wounded prisoners were safely back in Union lines.
Sergeant Evans survived his neck wound and returned to duty.
After recovering in Philadelphia, he acquired a commission as first lieutenant in the 8th
U.S.C.T. By war’s end, he had risen to the rank of captain, mustering out with his regiment in November 1865. He died on December 30, 1913, at age seventy. He is buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Neck wounds are horrifying things. They take our breath and
our voice. Thankfully, for Evans, by losing the latter, he kept his life.
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This is Sgt. Frank H. Evans, Company E, 121st Pennsylvania, the victim of an ugly, but non-fatal neck wound, suffered on July 1, 1863.
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