On October 29, 1910, a bronze statue of William Corby, CSC was dedicated on the battlefield at Gettysburg, the only one ever placed on that celebrated field to memorialize a chaplain. It commemorated a special moment nearly fifty years earlier when Father Corby gave general absolution to the kneeling soldiers of the Irish Brigade before they rushed to meet the enemy in Gettysburg's wheatfield. "Memoirs of Chaplain Life" is a very human account of life in a Civil War army, though Corby certainly saw the war through the eyes of a chaplain and wrote his memoirs explicitly "to show the religious feature that existed in the army", few aspects of the soldier's life, whether tragic or comic, escaped his notice. His work is filled with pictures of heat and dust, rain and mud, vermin and disease - all banes of the soldier's existence. In it are also to be found descriptions of terrible wounds, of the horrors of the hospitals and of reckless ambulances, in their desparate rush, running over wounded men still prostrate on the field. Humour and hope provide some leavening for these fearful scenes. And Corby describes the boisterous fun of the St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the Irish Brigade. Most imporatnt to Father Corby, however, was his ministering to the bodies and the souls of men who lived with constant hardship. Corby narrates not only his own story, but also the stories of several fellow chaplains who served with other Catholic regiments in the Union army. Corby's own faith emanates from his pages and makes more bearable some of the tragic events - such as his attempt to console a young soldier about to be executed for desertion - that his narrative describes.