It occurs to me that one "side effect" of the topic under discussion is that losses per unit per battle in terms of percentages may have been higher than previously realized. If a regiment of 500 men reported 100 casualties, that is a 20 percent casualty rate. But if only 400 men were actually present on the day of battle, than the casualty rate climbs to 25%. What I am trying to get across in my clumsy way is that you gents are suggesting that Civil War battles were grim affairs indeed.

I also would like to suggest, in a very tentative way, that this discussion may help to explain why Confederate armies often "bounced back" so quickly after a bloodletting--large numbers of men on leave or on detached duty or wandering around in the blackberry patch drifted in and quickly made up at last some portion of the losses. If their presence or absence was not recorded accurately, they constituted a sort of floating reserve that was "off the books."