The wife of a soldier from the Fourteenth Texas remembered what her husband shared about the first charge of the morning. For this battle the Tenth Texas and the Fourteenth Texas were consolidated. (Her description of the Rebel uniforms was probably an exaggeration, for this point in the war.)

"I shall write of a private in the ranks-little Jimmie Arnold, a fifteen-year-old orphan boy, a boy from our neighboring town of Carthage (East Texas), who was a member of company G, of which company my husband was first lieutenant. This company left Texas for the war in 1861 with one hundred and forty men. Of this number, only thirteen returned to their homes. The bodies of one hundred and twenty-seven were left to molder into dust on the different battle fields from Corinth until they laid down their arms at Meridian, Mississippi in 1865. And now only six of that thirteen are left. Little Jimmie Arnold was the pet of his company and of his regiment.

They were proud of his courage and fidelity, and he was fond of each and every one of his comrades. Especially did he love and reverence his colonel. After months of hard service and privations, the music of the fife and drum, the glamour of battle, the glittering guns, bayonets, and swords, the plumed chapeuaux, the handsome Confederate gray uniforms with the brass buttons, gold braid, and quivering epaulets of his officers—all were inspiring and still had a charm for the valiant young warrior, although he and a number of his comrades were ragged and almost barefooted, some with feet sore and bleeding, the blood running through the holes in their shoes; yet duty, with all of its appalling difficulties, still had its sweetness for him and was the lodestar of his existence. Nothing could daunt him, and danger was a word unknown to this hero of high ideals and loyalty to his country and to his friends. He was a brave as the bravest of any of their men, always ready and eager to go into a battle.

But one day, when a line was forming at the battle of Chickamauga, he had a presentiment that he would be killed if he went into it, and he said to Colonel Camp: "Colonel, you know I am not a coward and have always obeyed my officers’ commands; but don’t let me go into this fight."

‘Why Jimmie?’ asked Colonel Camp.

‘Because if you do I’ll be killed. Can’t you find some excuse for sending me to the rear?’

‘I can’t think of any,’ replied the good, conscientious Christian officer.

‘Let me take your horse to the rear, Colonel,’ pleaded the boy.

‘I can’t find any excuse for sending him back, Jimmie. Go on and do your duty, as you always have done.’

There was a fearful, a soulful pause; but in a moment, with heroic determination and courage stamped on his face, the nervy boy replied emphatically: ‘All right, Colonel, I will; but I’ll never come out of this fight alive.’

In a few minutes a charge was ordered, and in ten minutes after Jimmie went into the bloody battle of Chickamauga, where Texas was proud to own her sons, he was killed –the dauntless, brave Texas boy, as brave as Leonidas, who defended the pass of Thermopylae with his three hundred Spartans against Xerxes’s myriads of Persians. Who will say that his death was not as heroic as the Spartan king’s? For he went into the battle facing death as did Leonidas in the narrow pass. Who will say that General Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, or any other of our brave leaders was a greater hero than the little orphan boy, Jimmie Arnold?"

Source: "History of the Tenth Texas Cavalry (Dismounted) Regiment," by Chuck Carlock, with V. M. Owens, Chapter 10, pages 100-101.

Original Source: CONFEDERATE VETERAN, XXIII, 225.