Excerpts taken from a story written by Randall E. Black
In mid-April (1864), the War Department authorized the formation of a
new regiment from the surplus men under the name of the 2nd
PA HA provisional regiment. Officers for the newly formed regiment
were selected from among the officers and enlisted men of the old 112th regiment.
The 2nd PA HA provisional regiment (including my great grandfather,
William H. Yarnall) were scheduled for battlefront duty and attached to the Ninth
Corps. On May 27, most of the 2nd PA HA provisional was ordered
to battle duty. A small contingent remained in the Washington fortifications.
The Provisional went to Port Royal, VA by train on the 27th.
Next the men marched sixty miles across the country to join the Eighteenth Army
Corps, under General Baldy Smith. They arrived at Cold Harbor, VA on the 4th of
June.
The 2nd PA HA provisional (with eighteen hundred and thirty-six
men) was too large to maneuver in line of battle so it was formed into three battalions,
each having four companies. The average experienced field soldier's view of the
heavy artillery personnel that was garrisoned in Washington, D.C. was less than
favorable. The combat veterans were delighted by the way Grant took soldiers from
the bombproof Washington garrisons and added them to the field fighting force.
The veterans believed that the war was every soldier's fight and that they (the
"heavies") had been in a war without doing any fighting.
At Cold Harbor on June 3, (the day before my great grandfather's unit arrived)
a massive Federal assault on the Confederate entrenchments resulted in a great
number of Federal casualties. More than 7,000 men, most of them in the first two
hours of fighting, were wounded or killed. Due to the fire of Confederate sharpshooters
the dead and wounded could not be removed from the battlefield. After four days
of negotiating a truce under the strict observance of military protocol, an agreement
was finally reached. On June 7, units from the 2nd
PA HA provisional and other regiments were assigned the duty of removing
the dead and wounded from the battlefield. The Federal burial crews (under a white
flag of truce) worked between the hours of 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. that day removing
the dead and dying from the field.
Accustomed to the relative safety of their Washington assignments, the men's eyes
fell upon a hellish, indescribable site. Thousands of bodies lay stretched between
the lines. Some laid where they fell, four days earlier and were swollen and torn
by shot, shell and ball so they were scarcely recognizable. This was the first
close-hand observance of war's carnage for the men of the 2nd PA HA. When participating
in the burials they were so overcome by the stench as to be unfit for duty for
days. My great grandfather's discharge paper has a notation in the margin that
reads, "The man shot himself intentionally soon after the arrival of the
Regt at Cold Harbor, Va to get clear of duty." In the body of this document
is the comment "g.s. wound of right hand".