After the Battle of Gaines’s Mills

“While roaming over the field, gazing on the heaps of slain, I counted not less than ten Federal standard-bearers who had been laid out in a small ditch in one of their camps. I knew them to be such by the leathern belts used for carrying the colors, and could not but remark that several were shot in the head and body by numerous balls, as if an entire volley had been fired at them. They were fine, well-developed, muscular fellows, and lay in death with closed hands as if the colors had been torn from them.”
Battle Fields of the South, From Bull Run to Fredericksburgh, An English Combatant, Collector’s Library of the Civil War, Time-Life Books, p. 344