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following is an extract from Colonel Johnson's official report of the part his
brigade took in the action on the 30TH of August :

I could see that some movements were being made in that skirt of woods as early as
8 A. M., and during the day had frequent reports made to me to that effect. I, therefore,
placed the Forty-second, Captain Perm, in the railroad cut, and having assigned Captain
W. W. Goldsborough, of the late First Maryland (my old command), who was serving
with me as a volunteer, to the Forty-eighth, as Adjutant, put it in a copse which ran at
right angles from the railroad and the right of the Forty-second, and fronted the woods in
which the enemy were obviously making sotne movement. These positions overlooked the
enemy everywhere, and being very strong, were the ones I had determined to take and hold,
if attacked. The Twenty-first and Irish Battalion I held in reserve, concealed in the woods
on the hill, carefully instructing the officers at the order to charge without firing a shot.

About 4 P. M. the movements of the enemy were suddenly developed in a decided
manner. They stormed my position, deploying in the woods in brigade front and then
charging in a run, line after line, brigade after brigade, up the hill on the thicket held by
the Forty-eighth and the railroad cut occupied by the Forty-second; but as they uncov-
ered from the wood in which they had been massing during the whole day I ordered the
Twenty-first and Irish Battalion to charge, which they did with empty guns. I halted
them under the shelter of the cut, where, with the Forty-second, they held back the
enormous force pressing up the hill on them. Lieutenant Dabney had unfortunately been
wounded early in the day, and Captain Goldsborough, whom I had ordered to take
command, had fallen by my side in the charge, leaving the Forty-eighth without a superior
officer with them, and they consequently were soon driven out by the tremendous odds
against them; but for a short time the three regiments above named, viz.: The Forty-
second, Twenty-first, and Irish Battalion, by themselves breasted the storm, driving back
certainly twenty times their number. As soon as their position was known the rest of the
division came to their support, except the Third Brigade, which, under Colonel Taliafcrro,
was employed in whipping a division by itself. Before the railroad cut the fight was most
obstinate. I saw a Federal flag hold its position for half an hour within ten yards of a flag
of one of the regiments in the cut and go down six or eight times, and after the fight one
hundred dead were lying twenty yards from the cut, some of them within two feet of it.

The men fought until their ammunition was exhausted and then threw stones.
Lieutenant Lewis Randolph, of the battalion, killed one with a stone, and I saw him after
the fight with his skull fractured. Dr. Richard P. Johnson, on my volunteer staff, having
no arms of any kind, was obliged to have recourse to this means of offense from the
beginning. As line after line surged up the hill time after time, led up by their officers, they
were dashed back on one another until the whole field was covered with a confused mass
of struggling, running, routed Yankees. They failed to take the cut. The battle of the
left wing of the army was over, and the whole of Jackson's Corps advanced about a mile,