A couple excerpts from
Our Boys: The Personal Experiences of a Soldier in the Army of the Potomac by Alonzo F. Hill, 8th Pennsylvania Reserves.
Sick after drinking "bad whiskey", April 1862 (pp. 230-31):
We had been at Manassas a week, when we received orders to move to Catlett Station, on the Orange and Alexandria railroad, twelve miles from Manassas. I was too weak to walk, and was accordingly placed in a vehicle known as a "one-horse ambulance." This was my first ride in an ambulance; and, oh, how devoutly I prayed that it might be the last! For, oh, such a ride! I verily believe that a vehicle worse adapted to the transportation of sick and wounded soldiers could not be invented. Whenever the wheels came in contact with the slightest obstacle, the ambulance would rock; and jump, and spring, and surge, and shake, and quake in a frightful manner. Once, I remember, the wheel went suddenly into a gutter, and the body of the ambulance gave such a fearful leap, that it threw the driver from his seat, and he came down in the mud with a startling grunt. As for me, there I lay within that miserable contrivance, jostled from side to side, my head knocking violently against the frame-work at every revolution of the wheels, while I wondered how it would go to ride in such a jumping, jolting affair with a broken arm or leg. After being knocked about in the manner described for some hours, I was at last set down at Catlett Station, near the camp of my regiment, which had already arrived.
After being wounded at Antietam (p. 407):
I was carried directly through the strip of woods near which we had lain on the previous evening and during the night. Just in the rear of this wood stood a number of ambulances ready to convey wounded men from the field. I was placed in one—a one-horse one—another sufferer was placed beside me, and the jumping, jostling, springing, shaking, quaking vehicle moved off. I opened conversation with my companion in misery.
"Where—are—you (oh! oh!) wounded?" I asked, as the ambulance went plunging along.
"In the side—oh!" he exclaimed, as it gave a sudden leap. Then he asked—
"Where are you wo—oh!"
"In the—oh, dear—leg—thigh—oh!"
"Partners," interrupted the driver, at that moment, "we are about to go over a little rough place now, but we'll soon be over it."
"What kind of a rough—"
"Oh, it's only a little corn-field."
The ambulance now began to go over the ridges of the corn-field, and it made such a succession of starts and knocked me about so alarmingly, that I really wondered that the wounded limb stayed on at all. My companion groaned in agony.
At last the vehicle came to a stand-still, and we were lifted out and laid down in front of a barn.