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Over 5000 union troops fled to the river leaving a thin line of mostly Midwestern farm boys under the
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lawyer/soldier Benjamin Prentiss, who were determined to obey their general's order to maintain their
position at all costs at the center of the southern attack. At Alva’s position the defenders numbers continued
to diminish and the union lines bent inward, but they continued to resist more than a dozen massive assaults
against what became known as the hornets’ nest.

Finally, the confederates trained 62 cannon at point
blank range at the sunken road where Prentiss' men
still held out, and opened fire. The Hornets Nest
exploded in a hail of splintered trees and bodies. At
5:30 p.m., Prentiss and the 2200 survivors of his
Confederate Cannon
At Shiloh division, surrendered.

They had held up the southern advance for nearly 6 hours and it was growing dark. Beauregard wired Jefferson
Davis that he had Grant just where he wanted him and would finish him off in the morning. He proved to
somewhat less than prophetic.

In his first day of combat, in his first battle, Alva was hit by a musket
ball at about 4 pm, which entered his body approximately two and
one-half inches below the point of the hip in the left pelvic region of
the Ilium, damaged the bone of the pelvis and surrounding muscles,
and exited through his left buttocks. Everywhere wounded men lay in
agony. No provisions had been made to allow the two armies to gather
up and care for their wounded and throughout the night wounded

Civil War Monument men screamed for aid. Finally it began to rain and an observer noted
at Pittsburgh Landing that the fields ran red with the blood of the wounded and dead.

Although it must have been a particularly terrifying experience for a raw recruit, it does not appear that Alva
was one of those Union soldiers that turned and ran that day. As indicated above, he was shot while facing
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forward, and the exit hole was slightly lower than the entry hole. This would lead one to surmise that he
may have been standing up, possibly firing his rifle, when the Minnie ball that struck him down arrived from a
slightly higher elevation. He was one of the fortunate ones who were evacuated from the field of battle to the
bank of the river at Pittsburgh Landing where he lay all night in a drizzling rain, the gun boats firing over him
from time to time. He received no surgical aid until 10 am the following morning.

General Grant later said that the ground was so covered with
dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing
in any direction, stepping on dead bodies without a foot stepping
on the ground. In all, 2477 men were killed at the battle of Shiloh,
with the Union suffering upwards of 13,000 casualties and the
Confederates more than 10,000.

The armies that met on April 6 were larger than the armies that
Union Boats at Shiloh - Photographed
met at Bull Run, they fought three times as long, and they a few days after the battle
suffered approximately five times the losses, and although there had been heavy straggling on both sides,
there had been no actual rout. In the end, they seemed to more or less drift apart. In all American history, no
more amazing battle was ever fought than this one.

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