The deafening roar of musket fire came to a climax as Sgt. Moses Luce reached the
Confederate line. He looked around and saw only two men out of the seven he had brought with him still standing. Above the sounds of the battle, he heard a trumpet call.
“Retreat,” he thought.
He ran back across the field, dropping into a ditch to avoid the withering fire. He peered out, looked for an opening, and raced back to the Union line. A bullet smashed into his musket, shattering the wooden stock. Another bullet grazed his face, leaving a small cut above his eye. He jumped back into the Union ditch, when a voice called out to him.
“Luce!” he said. “Someone is calling you on the picket line!”
Luce turned and listened for the voice.
“I am bleeding to death,” it moaned. “I am bleeding to death.”
Luce dropped his shattered weapon and ran across the field toward the Confederate rifle pits. Through the smoke, he saw an old college friend, Asher LaFleur. His leg had been shattered from a cannon blast.
“LaFleur! I have come for you!” he cried. “I shall not leave you! Get upon my back, and I will carry you!”
Luce carried his wounded comrade back across the field, avoiding the murderous fire. He
brought him behind the lines, where he helped to stop the bleeding.
Luce would win the Medal of Honor for this action at Laurel Hill in Spotsylvania. His citation reads, “Voluntarily returned in the face of the advancing enemy to the assistance of a wounded and helpless comrade, and carried him, at imminent peril, to a place of safety.”
Luce was a 21yearold Hillsdale College sophomore when the Civil War broke out. He, along with LaFleur and man other Hillsdale College students, joined the ranks of the 4th Michigan Infantry.
His baptism of fire occurred at the battle of New Bridge in Virginia, where he met a young lieutenant by the name of George Armstrong Custer.
“Lt. Custer, snatching a Bowie knife from one of the prisoners, urged his horse across the stream to the front of the remainder of the regiment,” Luce wrote in his memoirs.
As the regiment formed along the banks of the New River, the brazen lieutenant wheeled his horse in front of the men.
“The rebels say we can’t stand cold steel,” he shouted. “Forward! And show them that the Michigan boys will give them all the cold steel they want!”
Custer would later enter the history books as the commander of the doomed 7th Cavalry at the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Luce later fought with the 4th at Gettysburg, where he recollected the night before the famed battle at the Wheatfield.
“We slept on our arms in the vicinity of the battlefield that night,” he wrote.
The men of the 4th entered the Wheatfield with 342 men. By the time they escaped a Confederate encirclement, only 55 men were left on the roster. Left behind were 287 men, all of whom were either captured, wounded, or killed. Among the wounded was Cpl. Asher LaFleur. Lieutenant Orvey Barret, who was shot in the leg during the battle, wrote an account of the aftermath.
“The struggle had been simply terrible. The carnage was awful, the fire incessant. Groans and oaths of the wounded were heard on every hand. Many would have recovered, had they had care, but it was impossible to reach all.”
Luce was discharged from service in June of 1864, less than a month after his heroic actions at Laurel Hill in Spotsylvania. He returned home to Hillsdale, where he finished out his college education, graduating with the class of 1866.
