Corporal Alonzo R. Kibbe, gunner of the 12^th Wisconsin battery. Present at the siege of Vicksburg, wounded at Savannah. He saw Grant and Sherman. He saw General Douglas MacArthur's father raise the flag at Missionary Ridge.

So run the citations of Mr. Kibbe, 97, of New Richmond, Wis., since 1868, who is at the GAR encampment here. He enlisted in the Union army when he was 17 at Janesville August 15, 1862.

At Missionary ridge, Mr. Kibbe watched the battle with a small spy glass. First there was a barrage against the fort. The infantry stormed up the ridge. Soon afterwards the Stars and Stripes went up on the fort. Mr. Kibbe learned recently that the man who put up that flag was the father of General Douglas MacArthur.

"Sherman was a military-looking man," Mr. Kibbe recalls, "but Grant looked more like a farmer than a military man. The men liked him because he was modest and because he knew how to handle a fight too."

"The 6^th Wisconsin battery was camped next to ours," Mr. Kibbe related, and Grant and about 20 officers came over to visit our officers."

After the meeting Grant and his company rode toward where the guns were parked.

A sentry standing guard with an old rusty cutlass ordered, "Halt!"

Grant halted.

"We have orders not to let mounted men through," the guard said.

Grant wheeled off and went around the guns.

"No one but Grant would have done that," Mr. Kibbe said.

"At the commencement of the war people had a good deal to say about Grant's drunkenness," Mr. Kibbe said. "I don't think he was ever drunk. I never saw him drunk."

Mr. Kibbe was in the army when the diet really consisted only of hardtack and beans. The rations consisted of hardtack, beans, sowbelly (side of pork) which they piled on the wharf like cord wood, and desiccated vegetables which were vegetables that were dried and pressed into packages a foot square.

Mr. Kibbe was wounded in the right shoulder and the left arm at Savannah. "We had four guns and the rebels had seven," Mr. Kibbe recalled. He was the gunner on the No. 1 gun. He gave orders to run the gun to the front lines.

There was one man pushing against one wheel and two men against the other. Mr. Kibbe started over to help the lone man. A shell exploded near him. He was thrown to the ground. He said he thought he got right up again, but that he must have been lying there for some time because the blood was dry on his wounds. His fellow soldiers thought he was dead.

Today as he sits sunning himself in his hotel room he can chuckle and say he fooled them all. For he and one other man from Texas are the only remaining men of the 12^th Wisconsin battery.