Chapter II: Part 2

The crossing of that river in the morning marked a new stage in the making of the regiment. We entered upon our first real discipline, and it was that of the march. Our tramp through Maryland, which had seemed so severe, was really child's play. Now we were part of a great campaigning host, a mere unit in the moving mass in which we must perforce keep our place. The discipline of the march may seem very simple, and it is in fact, simpler in some ways than people suppose who have formed their ideas from what they have seen in city parades. The tactics of the march are elementary. The soldier must know how to keep his place in a column of fours; the regiment must be able instantly to form in line. That is about all. On the march there is no attempt at keeping step; there is far less apparent order than in a political parade. Each man carries his gun as he pleases, only so that he interferes with no one else. Yet, with loose order and apparent freedom there is really severest restraint. The ranks must be kept closed up; to lag, even when you are most weary is a fault; to drop out of your place and "straggle" is a crime. A man is but a cog in the wheels of a remorseless machine, and he must move with it. The march is an art which some otherwise well-drilled troops are slow in acquiring. A regiment of infantry is seldom allowed the road. When an army is moving through a hostile country, the roads are monopolised by the artillery and the supply and ammunition trains; foot soldiers must take to the fields, find a way over ploughed ground or meadow, through fences, through brush, through woods, across bridgeless streams. In spite of obstacles the column must press on keeping its formation intact, and keep closed up. This is no simple matter.

Battle is one trial of a soldier's quality; the march is another scarcely less severe. It tries endurance. Did you ever walk twenty miles in a day? It is not a long walk, and it may be delightful. But if you have had to carry even a light satchel or a fish-basket with your wading-boots, you know how the trifling load tells before the day is over; how you try it first in one position, then in another, and each seems worse than the last. Now suppose yourself loaded with knapsack containing your half of a shelter tent, your blanket, and a few other necessaries; haversack filled with three days' rations; cartridge-box with from forty to sixty rounds of ammunition; canteen of water, heavy musket and bayonet--fifty or sixty pounds in all. Your twenty miles will equal forty without the load; yes, more than that, even if you could walk at will and choose the easiest paths, which is precisely what the soldier cannot do. You must stumble over stony places, and push through briers, and wallow through swampy ground, or toil through soft fields; now and then you must wade a brook up to your knees or deeper, and for the next hour your shoes will weigh a pound more than they ought and gather mud and absorb gravel. Perhaps the regiment may take the high-road for a time, and the dust, beaten small and deep by preceding hoofs and wheels will enshroud you in a horrible cloud from which there is no escape, and penetrate every crevice of your clothing, and fill your eyes and ears and mouth and nostrils, and blind and choke you.

There is no martial music to cheer you on; only the monotonous command, "Close up, men!" You lose consciousness of your soul, you know only that you have a body. Even that seems not to belong to you, it seems a badly oiled machine, part of a greater machine. And, then, on hot days the thirst! Your canteen will soon be exhausted; you will look with longing eyes at every stagnant puddle, and when a brook is reached--I have then seen men break through all restraint and madly dash at the water in spite of the drawn swords of officers vainly struggling to keep the ranks whole. As the day wanes the weariness amounts to agony. Every bone aches, every nerve is unstrung; strong men lose their self-control, sometimes almost their manhood.

The moods of men on the march are a curious study. Perhaps early in the day the whole line will break into song, especially if the route happens to be through an inhabited town. The Maryland villages used to ring with

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on."

Then silence will fall on every one as the burden begins to tell. Not a word will be spoken until some one breaks out with an oath, and then, all up and down the line, every man who ever swears will answer and the air will be blue with blasphemy.

War takes no account of Sabbaths. We often marched day after day until we fairly lost track of time and you might hear a dialogue like the following:

"Bill, what day is this?"

"Why, don't you know? This is Sunday."

"By George! is that so? Well, there's no rest for the wicked!"

And then the men would begin to talk about home, and somehow over the rudeness of war and the weariness of the march a breath of hallowed air would seem to waft itself, and the far-off sound of Sabbath bells would seem to steal, and the dim faces of distant loved ones would rise before us, until the spell would perhaps be broken by another chorus of profanity.

By force of stern necessity we became a good marching regiment long before we had half learned tactical drill, and the discipline did several important things for us. Our marching was not peaceful; it was through a hostile country. The enemy's cavalry hung about our flanks and rear and the sound of cannon was frequent. We had as yet no fighting but we were constantly threatened, and that helped the discipline. It taught us unceasing vigilance and the need of perpetual readiness; it also tried the nerves of our officers. The unfit ones began to drop off. First our lieutenant-colonel, then our major was smitten with what the men called "cannon fever." Their health failed suddenly, their resignations were offered and accepted and we were well rid of them. The captain of Company A, who now became major, was a fine type of the class of men by whom our volunteer army was mainly officered. He was a plain citizen who had been superintendent in a manufactory, and his military knowledge was only such as could be gained in a militia company. He had however, a strong soldierly instinct, and better still, his personal character compelled respect. Familiar in manner with no "airs," yet always dignified and firm; modest, yet as we found when the test came, unflinchingly brave; with keen natural intelligence, quick to grasp a situation and prompt in action he proved that good officers are born, not made. His awkwardness on horseback afforded amusement only for a little while. In a few weeks he rode like a cavalryman, and every fresh trial of his quality raised him in our esteem and affection.

The weeding process worked among the men in a different way. The old and weak and physically unfit broke down. Some of them died; a number of them were discharged from the service. At the end of a month we had lost more officers and as many men as a smartly-contested battle would have cost us, and instead of being weaker we were distinctly stronger for it. The law of the survival of the fittest was beginning to work. In another way the weeding process proceeded. Every army requires a great many non-combatants as its servants. There must be waggoners, clerks at headquarters, ambulance drivers, hospital attendants, "detailed men" of many sorts, and each regiment has to furnish its quota of these. When, therefore, an order would come to detail a man, perhaps for ambulance driver, the colonel would send it down to a captain with the hint, "Detail the worst dead beat in your company." Sometimes these non-combatant positions were sought by those who had no stomach for the fight, and thus, in different ways, our thinned ranks became cleaner.

We learned other things by the discipline of the march. We learned to live as soldiers must. Life in a well-ordered camp and camp life in the field are vastly different. The army lived in shelter tents. These were simply pieces of cotton cloth about six feet square, and each man carried one piece on his knapsack. Two or three buttoned together and stretched over such poles or sticks as could be found, or over muskets set in the ground when nothing else could be had, formed our habitation. We literally carried our houses on our backs. We slept on the ground, or rather, we learned not to sleep on the ground. Pine branches made a luxurious bed, but anything served--dried grass, boughs of saplings, even corn stalks, though they were worse than boarding-house mattresses. I have slept on unthreshed wheat--anything to keep the body from direct contact with the ground, which, even in summer chills one through before morning. Then, wood for fires must be had. Through the hill country of Virginia we used the fences. When the welcome halt was called at evening and arms stacked, it was a sight to see eight or nine hundred men joining with wild cheers in a mad charge on the nearest rail fence. Sometimes our colonel would draw us up in line and give the word, so that all might have an even chance, and then, after a brisk scrimmage the fence would disappear as if by magic. Dry rails made the best of camp-fires, but the skill which men developed at fire-making was wonderful. We had few axes beside the dozen carried by the pioneer corps, whose duty it was to clear obstructions from the road; we had to break up our rails or break down branches as best we could. Our jack-knives did yeoman service. Often green wood alone was available; and I have actually seen fires kindled in the midst of pouring rain with nothing but such apparently impossible materials as green pine saplings.

Two men from each company were detailed as cooks. They were seldom favourites with the men. On the march, and, finally, almost altogether their services were dispensed with. We preferred to do our own cooking, especially when it came to the coffee. Coffee was our chief comfort and our main necessity. We carried it in the haversack, in a little bag with a partition: on one side ground coffee, on the other, the smaller side, a little brown sugar; and we made it generously and drank it strong. Coffee, hardtack, and salt pork were the standard marching rations.

It was curious to notice how men treated the rations question. Three days' supply at a time was dealt out to us. Some of the men would make way with their stock in two days, and then go begging among their comrades. Upon others excessive weariness acted as a stay upon appetite, and the three days' rations would be more than enough. I think these were the men who stood the hardship of the march best. After supper came sleep, the sleep of exhaustion; and then, at day-break, the reveille, roll-call, hasty breakfast (like the supper, of hardtack, pork, and coffee). Then canteens were filled from the nearest available water, knapsacks packed, and precisely at sunrise the column would be formed and the march begun. The rule was, march two hours, rest ten minutes; except at noon, when twenty minutes' rest was allowed.

At these rests the men would lie down wherever they happened to be, and think the hard ground blessed and the time too short. Sometimes, though this was later, during the battle season we had night marches, and as illustrating the result of the discipline of the march even upon new troops, I have seen men, when halt was called at night, lie down in the dusty road and fall instantly fast asleep; but at the low-spoken order, "Fall in, men!" they would as instantly rise, and, before they were fully awake step into their proper places in the line. Under the discipline of the march, in three months' time we had learned lessons which the best-trained city militia regiments never learn and which made us veterans in comparison with them.

If you ask how we learned, I can only answer that we did as we saw the old troops about us doing. And it is but justice to our colonel to say that he knew the duties of the march, and especially those of the camp, and was strict to the point of severity, with the officers especially.

An army of a hundred thousand men on the march would be a wonderful sight if one could see it, but the columns stretch too far to be visible all at once. They reach for miles, and woods or hills or valleys hide them. But occasionally we had impressive views from some height into the country below, over which the endless lines moved like vast serpents, and sometimes we had curious surprises. I remember how one day our regiment took an unfrequented road and we seemed to be alone. No other troops were in sight, and all day long we speculated upon our destination. Some thought we were being sent back to Washington for garrison duty; others that we were detached for some special, perhaps perilous, service. There were all sorts of surmises, but finally night came, and we camped on the hillside of a long and deep valley. We lighted our fires, and, in apparent response other fires began to twinkle from the hills beyond and beside us and from down in the valley, and, as it grew darker the fires increased in numbers and in brightness until, in every direction, as far as the eye could see, the lonely woods seemed changed as if by magic into a vast city. We were in the very midst of the great army; we had been marching with it all day.

Our first battle was that of Fredericksburg, and we went into it under every disadvantage. Our showy colonel was absent on sick-leave, our only field officer was our yet untried major; in fact, not a single one of our officers had ever been really under fire and, beside our imperfection in drill, we were wretchedly armed. In the haste to put us into the field we had been supplied with Harper's Ferry smooth-bore muskets,--antiquated weapons utterly unfit for modern warfare. We knew they were useless except at short range; we suspected that some of them would prove more dangerous to ourselves than to the enemy. The men despised them, and called them "stuffed clubs;" but they saved us from being sacrificed.

I was never prouder of my regiment than at the moment when we were ordered to the front. We had been for hours exposed to a long-range artillery fire, and one regiment after another of the brigade had been sent forward until we were left alone. We knew the helplessness of our inexperience and the uselessness of our old guns; yet when the command came there was no faltering. The men marched away with cheerful readiness, and in better line than we could often show on parade. But ere we reached the battle's bloody edge we were ordered back again. The commander of the brigade protested. He said that, armed and officered as we were, it would be sheer murder to send us in.

And so it happened that we saw that awful battle from afar, though for two days we endured one of the most trying of the ordeals which come to soldiers. We had to lie still and be shot at. Few indeed are hit by long-range artillery fire, but every catastrophe seems doubly dreadful because you see it all and can do nothing but wonder if it will be your turn next. You fall into a dolefully speculative mood and into watching for the sound of the howling shells. You can tell if one is coming your way, but never just how near. Sometimes a shot will strike close in front and cover you with a shower of gravel, or a shell will explode over your head and rend the air with demoniac shrieks of flying fragments. Death seems even nearer and more horrible than in close battle where you can do as well as suffer.

The panorama of that battle was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. From the amphitheatre of hills on either side the river a hundred cannon roared. The space between seemed filled with a chorus of demons. In the lulls of this pandemonium, for miles along the line, the mournful, far-away skirmish fire echoed constantly, and ever and anon on that tragic Saturday, away at our right we could hear the shouts of charging men coming like a fateful wail across the field, and then the steady roll of the Confederate file fire from the deadly stone wall against which fourteen brigades were successively and vainly hurled. And every charging shout meant that men for duty's sake, but hopelessly, were meeting death by hundreds.

Incidents of that battle will always dwell in my memory. There I saw a soldier's death for the first time. We were in line with other troops well up toward the front. Beyond, in the open fields the skirmishers were at work. We could see little of them save the puffs of smoke from their rifles. A man came over from a neighbouring regiment to speak to a friend near me. As he stood talking, a bullet from the skirmish line struck him in the breast and he fell at our feet. I can feel the shock that went through me even now.

Tragedy is scarcely ever without its by-play of comedy. We were for a time lying at rest behind a low, bare ridge which slightly protected us from the enemy's fire. Suddenly a rabbit started up from a little clump of bushes. Three or four soldiers instantly sprang after him. Presently the rabbit neared the ridge and ran to the top of it but his pursuers, now in full chase forgot all danger and followed. And the picture in my mind is that of the rabbit and his reckless hunters darkly silhouetted upon the summit of the ridge and punctuated here and there with the sudden white cloud of a bursting shell. I think the rabbit escaped; the men, I know came off unharmed.

We had had no breakfast, and when the enemy's fire lulled several of the men tried to do a little cooking. A comrade near me was busily engaged in frying a piece of pork in a pan extemporised from an old canteen. Suddenly the batteries reopened; several stacks of muskets were struck, with the effect of making them look like a nest of snakes. Our commander said, "Some of you men might as well move up nearer the ridge where there is better protection." I could see that my friend of the frying-pan was growing anxious. He looked at his pork and then at the shelter. It was hard to abandon his breakfast; but life was growing dearer every moment, and with sudden impulse he left all and ran for refuge. How big Corporal J----, lying near me, laughed as he rescued and appropriated the burning pork! The man did not hear the last of that frying-pan incident for months; yet he was a brave fellow, and afterwards did his duty nobly in the face of far greater danger than any we saw that day.

Men will do queer things in battle. I knew of a regiment sent to support a battery when the enemy was about to charge. The men went to their post at the double quick with fixed bayonets, and just in front of the battery they were ordered to lie down so that the guns might fire over their heads. As they did so one man accidentally pricked another with his bayonet and the fellow, enraged, struck at him. They dared not stand up to fight for fear of having their heads blown off by the battery close behind and therefore, on their knees, under the guns they had it out in a fisticuff duel before the officers could interfere and stop them.

We lost only a few men at Fredericksburg but we gained a great experience. The battle took place in December and after it the army went into winter quarters. A field officer from one of the old regiments of the brigade was detailed to command us in the protracted absence of our colonel. He knew our defects. We needed drill. He gave it to us without stint and worked us as we had never been worked before--company and skirmish drill in the morning, battalion drill all the afternoon, so that after the evening dress parade we were as weary as bricklayers. Nothing escaped his notice; he made you feel that his eyes were on you personally and his orders came in a sharp, explosive tone that made men jump. After an hour's hard work on the drill ground, some of us would grow careless, and then that rasping voice would startle the whole battalion. "Why don't that man hold that gun _properly_?" and a half dozen muskets would straighten up with a jerk.

Under our own colonel the discipline of the regiment had been excessive in unimportant details and lax in essentials. All this was changed. We felt ourselves ruled with an iron hand, yet with just discrimination, so that while we stood in awe of our new commander we learned to like him greatly; the more so when we found that he liked us, and in a lurid, unrepeatable epigram expressed his opinion of what might have been made of us if he could have had us from the first. Then, too, he looked carefully after our comfort and our necessities. Some rascally quartermaster had nearly starved us with bad rations. He quickly stopped that. Moreover, to our great satisfaction, new rifles for the regiment arrived. We gladly bade good-bye to our old "stuffed clubs," and we had occasional target practice with our new and effective weapons. A fresh spirit came into us; we imagined ourselves fit for anything.

Yet the regiment was really like a great boy who begins to think himself a man. The weeding process was still incomplete and progressing. Captains and lieutenants disappeared one by one. Some who were otherwise competent had broken down in health; others had been proved unfit. Their places were filled by promotions, mainly of non-commissioned officers.

Our experience was precisely that of almost every volunteer regiment in the army. After the first twelve months' service the line was usually transformed. Serjeants and corporals, men who had been appointed because of fitness rather than chosen because of popularity or influence came into command as company officers. In much less than a year not a single one of our original field officers remained, and only three of the ten original captains of companies.

As to the men in general, the weeding process showed some results worthy of record. It proved that very few men over forty years of age were fit for war, either physically or morally, and that boys from eighteen to twenty made excellent soldiers. It was not simply that the young fellows were more reckless, but they never worried about coming danger. They were more cheerful; they fretted less over privations; they actually endured hardships better than older and stronger men. Our losses among the boys were chiefly in battle; our losses among the old men were mainly by sickness and physical exhaustion. Doubtless it might be different with a body of men carefully selected and gradually inured to a soldier's life; but in our volunteer regiments, hastily enlisted and composed of men whose habit of life was suddenly changed, the facts as observed in our experience would, I think, always hold good.

The monotony of camp life was broken by frequent picket duty. This was sometimes dangerous and often trying, especially to the non-commissioned officers on whom special responsibility rested; yet in pleasant weather at least, it was a welcome change from the dull routine of camp. It was also an essential part of our education. Pickets are the antennæ of an army. In the face of the enemy the antennæ become formidable as skirmishers. A picket line, in case of need is quickly transformed into a skirmish line. Nothing teaches vigilance, the use of independent judgment, prompt action in emergency, and at the same time strict subordination, like outpost or skirmish work. We had some exciting and some amusing experiences.

One night the line ran through a swamp. It was moonlight, and in the small hours toward morning things looked weird and ghostly. In visiting my sentries I came to one of our boys, a mere stripling, whom I found in a state of high excitement. "Serjeant", he said, "I wish I could be relieved; I'm afraid to stay here." I asked him what the trouble was and he answered, "There's a wolf out there," pointing to a dismal clump of bushes. "I saw him come out of the woods and go across the swamp into those bushes. He was close to me. I do wish I could be relieved; I'm afraid to stay here alone!"

I knew it was a trick of the imagination, or possibly a stray fox, and told him so; but it was of no use. The poor fellow's terror was pitiful. Yet that same boy was afterward as bold as a lion when bullets were flying thick and men were falling about him.

Toward the end of January there were rumours in the air. They furnished food for camp gossip, and were beginning to leave us sceptical, when orders came suddenly, and we found ourselves one gray morning actually on the move--where or why we knew not, though it was clear that no ordinary enterprise was at hand; for the whole army was in motion, and in all our experience, never had a march been so forced. It was hurry, hurry, almost at a trot, with rests so infrequent and so short that men, from sheer inability to keep the pace began to drop out of the ranks. The roads were good, but the sky was overcast and when, early in the evening we halted and pitched our shelter tents for the night, the weather was threatening. Before morning a cold, northeast storm had set in; all day long the icy rain poured down. The Virginia roads were speedily melting into muddy creeks. The movement of artillery or pontoons was fast becoming an impossibility; but at nightfall a desperate attempt was made. Our regiment was among the unfortunates detailed to extricate the ponderous pontoon train from its muddy fetters. Imagine a bridge of boats loaded upon waggons, each great flat-bottomed boat about twenty feet long, and alternating with the boats, waggon-trucks loaded with bridge timbers, six or eight horses to each of these unwieldy vehicles, and the whole train hopelessly mired in a rough wood road; wheels sunk to the hubs, horses floundering helplessly, some of them half dead with their terrible work; the night dark, the half-frozen rain pouring pitilessly--and then perhaps you may picture the task which was ours. Muskets, equipments, even overcoats were left at our tents. We were marched about a mile to the place where the pontoons were stalled; ropes were made fast to the waggons and, with a hundred men to each, we dragged them one after another out of the woods into open ground. There they sank more hopelessly than ever. The force of men had to be doubled. We could have drawn them far more easily without wheels; but at last, when it was nearly midnight they were all ranged upon solid ground on a little knoll.

As to ourselves, we were drenched with the rain, bruised with our falls, half frozen with the cold, and plastered with mud from head to foot. And in this plight we were kept standing idly for a bitter hour, waiting for another division of the pontoon train. But it never came, and finally we were permitted to return to our tents where we found everything, even our blankets soaked with the merciless rain.

The work and exposure had been horrible. I remember, as we marched back to camp seeing one poor fellow, a member of a veteran regiment, who had apparently gone crazy under the strain; he was screaming and swearing wildly, while his comrades vainly strove to calm him.

By morning the failure of the enterprise, which was an attempt to surprise the enemy, was evident. The retreat of the army through the mud and the rain which followed was an experience the horror of which none that shared it can forget. The elements were the foes which prevailed against us then, and the demoralisation of the army was worse than any we ever saw inflicted by battle with mortals. Many men died from exposure and exhaustion. This was the famous "mud march."

Winter passed quickly after this, and with the spring came preparation for a new campaign. Our jaunty colonel had recovered his health and returned to duty; the list of field officers was completed by the appointment of a new lieutenant-colonel. All that we knew of him was that he had served with distinction upon General Hancock's staff. He was eccentric in manner, evidently unpractised in the handling of an infantry regiment, and we took to him none too kindly at first. But when we came to know him his high character, his resourcefulness and his noble courage won our admiration and our profound respect. He was destined soon to become the commander of the regiment.

The last step, the most important of all, in the making of the regiment was now before us. At the first Fredericksburg we had endured the trial of battle partially and passively. The more real and active experience was now before us. We were members of Sedgwick's Corps, whose brilliant capture of the Fredericksburg heights turned the tide of disaster at the battle of Chancellorsville and failed to pluck victory from defeat only because of the unaccountable inertness of the commander of the Union forces. Our regiment was one of those chosen to form part of one of the storming columns. It may seem strange that new troops should be selected for such perilous and difficult duty, yet this was often done. The new regiments were strong in numbers; they had not been decimated by battle and disease; and though less reliable than older battalions, when no complicated manoeuvres were required, when the only thing was to go straight forward against a fire from the front their wild _élan_ sometimes accomplished wonders. They were seldom spared in close battle; it was a way, though a costly one, to break them in and make soldiers of them. The heaviest losses often fell upon them.

Placed between two other regiments of the brigade, in a sunken road where we were sheltered from the enemy's fire, we anxiously awaited the signal for the assault. We could see something of the work before us. Nearly a mile of open field lay between us and the base of the hills whose crests were crowned with the Confederate earthworks, and every foot of that open ground was swept by their fire. It must be crossed before the storming column could reach the heaviest part of its task and begin the real assault upon those deadly hills. All along at our right, away up into the streets of Frederick a mile or more away other columns were stationed at intervals, some of them facing stronger defences than those against which our attack was to be directed.

At noon precisely, the signal guns boomed out and we sprang to the charge. From the very first our colonel blundered. He failed to obey his orders; he led us wildly in a wrong direction under the very guns of one of our own batteries. The hills in front of us flamed and roared with hostile fire and our men were beginning to fall, but this disturbed us less than the confusing orders which sent us now this way, now that. It seemed as though the regiment was doomed to disgrace, if not to destruction. Then it was that we discovered the heroic character of our lieutenant-colonel. Ignoring his incompetent and now helpless superior, he calmly assumed command and there, in the face of the enemy's fierce fire halted us, re-formed our disordered line and led us forward once more. There was no lack of courage in the men; they were willing to do all that could be asked of them. Throughout the remainder of that deadly though glorious charge the regiment proved that all it needed was what it had at last found--a true leader. We gained the crest of the hills along with the rest of the column. Our first real battle was fought. We had come through it, not indeed faultlessly--few new regiments ever do that--but so that we could look with reverence upon our torn flag, and view our sadly thinned ranks with sorrow but without shame. Not perfectly, yet not unworthily we had endured the ordeal of battle.

In seven months the regiment, which left home little better than a mob save for the character of its members and the spirit which animated it, had become a battalion of seasoned and well-officered soldiers fit to take its place in a brigade of veterans. We had learned to wear the armour so hastily put on. We had fitted ourselves to it.

If the story of the making of this regiment is worth the telling, that is not because it is in any way exceptional but because it is typical. Some regiments were more fortunate than ours in their first commanders; some met the test of battle sooner. Details vary, yet the process through which we went is a fair example of that by which hundreds of thousands of peaceful American citizens were transformed into the soldiers of one of the most formidable armies of history. The process was not ideal; it was in many ways illogical, unmilitary and wasteful; yet its results have seldom been surpassed.

The Household of the Hundred Thousand

The site of the old home camp, the first mustering ground of many regiments, is now covered with pretty suburban homes about which I sometimes think, the ghosts of war times must play at midnight.

For us young fellows it was a rude beginning of real life when we found ourselves inside the great board fence and line of sentries which enclosed the rows of rough, wooden barracks. The members of our own company were indeed mostly neighbours, their faces were familiar, we had grown up together; yet never before had we been thrown into such intimate association. It is one thing to meet a man every day on the street or even at work; it is quite another to be compelled to bunk with him and take your breakfast out of the same camp-kettle. For the youth who had been kept in a glass case at home this experience was trying and often disastrous, but for the most of us it was wholesome. We learned our own hitherto-unsuspected faults, we discovered the good qualities of even our most faulty comrades, we saw human nature at close range.

Even the officers could not escape the influence of this enforced commingling. They had, indeed, separate quarters and their own mess; they stood also on a vantage ground of almost despotic authority, for from the moment when we were mustered into service we were subject to the same military law which governed the regular army. But drawn as our officers were from the same mass, knowing their men for old neighbours, often for intimate friends, frequently for those who had been at least their social equals they could not hold themselves far aloof, and few of them cared to do so. They could form no separate caste and this, perhaps, had its disadvantages; but for these there were certainly large compensations. It became necessary for an officer to prove his right to rank by qualities of leadership. The best officers were those who, without sacrifice of dignity kept a lively sense of comradeship with their men.

The work of drill began before we received either arms or uniforms, and from the very first we managed to go through with that essential of camp life, the evening dress parade. Then the grounds would be filled with spectators, mostly home friends: fathers, mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts, bringing with them dainties to supplement what seemed to them the hard fare of camp. We lived well and were not a little spoiled in those days; and when we departed for the front, the mistaken kindness of those who loved us loaded us down with all sorts of knick-knacks for comfort and convenience. Though loath to part with these, our first marching days made us more loath to carry them. When a man's back becomes his only storehouse, he soon finds that riches do not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses. Patent writing-cases, extra socks and mittens, "ponchos" for the shoulders, "havelocks" for the head, etc, etc, began to strew the road, and in a short time we were reduced to an absolutely socialistic equality in this world's goods. Whatever differences remained were those purely personal ones which can be discovered only by experience of each other's ways and characters.

In a regiment of a thousand men any extensive acquaintance outside one's own company comes slowly; yet many things served to bring us into fellowship. There was little clannishness, every man in blue was a comrade; yet, after all, each company was a family by itself, and in the company little coteries collected like the eddies in a river pool.

On the march two men usually tented together. In camp, when logs or brush were available, four could use their tent pieces to better advantage than two or three, and the camp was thus made more compact.

Men came together as tent-mates by a process of natural or social selection. They had been schoolmates or work-fellows in the same shop, perhaps they were related as brothers or cousins, or they had been near neighbours and old friends. So it was at first; but new experiences in toil and peril were often solvents out of which new associations crystallised. Kindred spirits found each other; more and more the company became a greater family within which lesser and more intimate families grew up. Sometimes there were disagreements which broke up first arrangements; but commonly a quiet, almost unnoticed attraction of affinity drew the final groups together in bonds seldom broken save by death or disabling wounds or sickness. A few of these soldierly friendships bind old men even to-day; many more are cherished by lonely survivors as memories too sacred for common talk.

When for months you and your comrade have slept at night under one blanket and shared each other's daily bread, even though it were but hard-tack; when you have learned to depend on him and he upon you for help in trouble or comfort in sickness; when together you have entered the hell of deadly battle--after which the first question would be: "Is Joe safe?" "Where is Sam?" "Is little Gus alive?"--when together you have suffered hunger, thirst, heart-breaking weariness; above all, when, huddled together in storm or cold you have had to endure long days of dreary, monotonous, comfortless idleness then you know what it means to live a common life with a fellow-man; and if he and you meet the test, then you know what friendship means.

In the routine of camp life the music of drum and fife was conspicuously audible. We were wakened at daybreak by the shrill tune of the reveille; the last sound at night was that of the drum perambulating the camp with "taps," commanding "lights out" and sleep; while all day long frequent summons to varied duties came by "call" of drum and fife. There was "sick call," which brought all the indisposed who were able to walk into forlorn squads to be conducted by the orderly serjeants to the surgeon's tent for treatment. Its absurdly merry notes seemed to say:

"Come to the Doctor's
And get your castor oil."

Then "guard call," inevitable as the day, but always unwelcome. Drill call or "assembly" meant simply our daily work. At dress parade, which closed the day's active duties, the band discoursed its most martial strains, and after supper we heard it once more in the pleasant tones of "retreat," and later of "tattoo" the music of which comes most impressively into recollection. From one camp after another the measured minor strains would sound forth; from near and far, from camps away beyond our sight, it would melt into distance, and then beyond the westward woods the artillery bugles would take it up until it died away with their mellow notes. It was the voice of the comradeship of a mighty, invisible host.

One can readily understand how persistently, how intimately this music of drum and fife wove itself into our lives. Some of those queer, old-fashioned, half-melancholy, half-merry tunes sing themselves in my memory even now.

What of the band in the day of battle? Was not martial music the soldier's inspiration? Did we not charge to its thrilling strains? We did nothing of the kind. There was other work for the musicians. On the approach of battle they were always sent to the rear for duty as stretcher-bearers and helpers in the field hospital. One pretty sure sign that bloody work was before us was the disappearance of the band; and the grimmest, most sickening, yet most merciful work of war was theirs at such times.

In active campaigning, our camps were apt to be hasty, though never disorderly bivouacs, and even if a few days' halt were made and the camp duly formed, rest for weary and foot-sore men took precedence of drill and, in fact, of everything not absolutely necessary. But one thing was inevitable as day and night. This was roll-call. In storm or sunshine, in camp or on the march, before and after battle, the first thing in the morning and the last at night, we had to answer to our names. The first serjeant calls the roll. He knows the list by heart, and calls it off without book, in the dark if need be.

At first irritatingly suggestive of that more than schoolboy tutelage which is one penalty of a soldier's life, the morning and evening roll-call by its insistent monotony gradually grew into an accepted item of existence, like salt pork and hard-tack. But when exposure, toil, and battle began to thin the ranks, the roll-call gained a new meaning; it became a none too oft-repeated personal history of our lives, a daily bulletin of passing events and a reminder of those already past. It told of the sick and disabled, of those fallen out by the way, prisoners perhaps in the hands of the enemy, here and there of one promoted, here and there of one dead. There were days when those of us who could answer to our names did so with a feeling of solemn thankfulness and other days when the omission, or perhaps the inadvertent calling of a name sent a rush of sad remembrance through the ranks.

Imagine, if you can, the roll-call at night after a day of battle!--the mustering of the thinned company in the darkness; the suspense as the familiar names are spoken--it may be by an unfamiliar voice, for in battle death seemed to seek and find the serjeants; the frequent pauses for inquiry; perhaps the answer of a comrade for one who has fallen, perhaps a mournful silence. Oh, those silent names! For days, yes, for weeks and months every now and then you seem to hear them at evening roll-call, and somewhere, close beside you it may be, an unseen presence seems to whisper: "Here!"

I think all who passed through it remember the winter of the Fredericksburg campaign with a shudder. Preceding the battle came freezing nights with thawing days, rain-soaked or snow-bound camps; days when our little tents were first buried in the snow, then frozen so stiff that when marching orders came we could scarcely strike or fold them; then short but horrible marches through slush and mud with our doubly-heavy half-frozen loads; scanty rations withal because of delayed supply trains: a month of exposure, discomfort, and misery.

The like of this is, however, what soldiers must expect, and if victory had come at the end we could have borne far worse hardship cheerfully. But the climax was the slaughter at Fredericksburg. The sting of that defeat was felt not as a dishonour, but as undeserved disaster. We knew that courage and devotion such as any people might be proud of had been uselessly sacrificed. Yet the gloom of those winter days after the battle was not that of despair; it was the bitter prospect of indefinitely prolonged struggle, an outlook dark indeed to men who were soldiers not for glory but only for home and country.

The depression of that time was doubtless responsible for at least as large a loss of life as the battle beside the river. Hardship and exposure had bred sickness, and the mood of the hour offered feeble resistance to death. For months the little funeral processions were mournfully frequent; from our own brigade alone there were often two or three in a day.

There are no funerals on the march; there are none after battle. On the march, if a man falls out of the ranks stricken with mortal sickness or exhaustion he is left to be picked up by the ambulance, perhaps to die alone by the way. The column cannot halt. After battle, there are but ghoulish burials. But in settled camp the decencies of death are rudely observed.

The first funeral in our company was that of one of our serjeants, a young man whom we all loved. He died shortly after Christmas-time. A box of good things from home had lately arrived; out of the boards of that box we managed to make a coffin for our dear comrade and the whole company marched to his grave. But the most of our dead were buried without coffin and funerals became too common for any but scantiest ceremony. A drum and fife playing the Dead March, a firing squad of three to give a parting volley over the grave, then the chaplain, then the body of the dead soldier wrapped in his blanket and carried on a stretcher by two men followed perhaps by half-a-dozen intimate friends, and that was all.

In the brigade graveyard at the top of the hill which grew so dismally in population during the winter, there were no headstones--only little pine boards torn from empty cracker-boxes, with the name of the departed written thereon in lead pencil or cut in with a jack-knife. I remember several headboards hewn from cedar, the most lasting of woods, made with great care and pains, with deep-cut inscriptions. These, you may be sure were stronger proof of true affection than many of the costly monuments which challenge the beholder's eye in our great cemeteries.

It is a pathetic fact that all through the war many men who might have recovered from the fevers and other ailments common to a soldier's life died because homesickness had quenched their power of resistance to disease. Indeed there were not a few deaths from homesickness pure and simple. It is not a complaint recognised in official reports, but ask any army surgeon and he will probably tell you some surprisingly sad tales.

Fatal cases were, however, exceptional, though the ordinary malady was common enough. Sometimes its manifestations were serio-comic, as for instance in my own case.

In the midst of our worst other discomforts, we were for a time compelled to subsist upon ancient hard-tack, which was often in such condition that, "if you called, it would come to you;" and one day I strolled off alone into the woods beyond the camp and sitting on a log, gave myself to meditation. I thought of my privations, not bitterly, but with a deliberate and curiously analytical wonder. I said to myself: "How much more a man can stand than he would have believed possible!" Then my thoughts wandered to my far-away home with its simple luxuries and comforts, and that which came most vividly to mind was the fact that once--it seemed ages ago--I had really had good, wholesome soft bread to eat every day, and three times a day at that! I then began to ask myself: "Would I ever again have soft bread every day?" "Was it possible that such happiness could be mine?" And I said to myself dolefully: "No! It is not likely. You are a soldier; you can henceforth have only soldier's fare; you will probably fill a soldier's grave. You will never taste soft bread again!"

Now this may seem absurd in the telling, yet God knows it was horribly real at the time.

But this was only a passing mood with the mass of us. We were a host of young men; life was too strong and elastic for even the depression which followed Fredericksburg to hold us down. We found ways to amuse ourselves.

One of the frequent but evanescent snow-storms of that semi-southern land had fallen, and snowballing became a common sport. Finally an organised contest was proposed between our regiment and two others of the brigade. We were so much stronger in numbers than the older regiments that this apparently one-sided arrangement only equalised forces, and as an offset we were given the doubtful advantage of the defensive. Both sides were drawn up in rigid military array with officers in their places of command. As for ourselves, we made piles of snowballs and awaited the onset. It came like a whirlwind; those veterans had not been through a dozen real battles for nothing, and as their line approached and the missiles began to fly, it was like a hailstorm. The snowballs were wet and hard, often icy; both sides were in hot earnest and like the ancient Romans we aimed at the faces of our foes. I hardly know how it all looked for I was in the thick of it and almost blinded, but I know how it felt. If the snowballs had been bullets, I should have been riddled from head to foot.

We stood our ground manfully for a little while; but the too subtle strategy of our commander had divided our force; we were outnumbered at the critical point and the superior discipline of our opponents prevailed. We had to confess ourselves beaten; and from the way our veteran friends crowed over us I almost think they were tempted to inscribe that snowball victory on their battle-flags.

An even better antidote for the blues was the work which became necessary as the army went into winter quarters. There is no pleasanter occupation than home building, be it ever so rude, and we took much pains and found great enjoyment in the making and furnishing of our little houses. Some regiments whose location was near suitable timber built good-sized log huts; we were compelled to be more modest. The dwelling which my own group of four tent-mates erected and occupied may serve as a fair example. Four pieces of shelter tent buttoned together made the roof which covered a log structure twelve feet long and five or six feet wide. The log walls were about three feet high; but as the ground sloped away from the company street we dug out the rear half of our hut, and there we had a little room in which we could stand erect. This served for our kitchen. The more elevated part was occupied by a broad bed of poles covered with dried grass and our blankets. This made a springy couch on which the four of us could sleep comfortably side by side; and the edge of the bed was just high enough to make a convenient seat with our feet resting on the kitchen floor. About the sides of the house were shelves and pegs for our belongings.

In the kitchen end, beside the door, we built a fireplace and chimney. Now a wooden fireplace and chimney may seem ludicrously impractical, yet that is what we and thousands of others actually built from green pine sticks. But we fireproofed it with a coating of clay on the inside, and it answered its purpose perfectly. It "drew" finely and gave us no end of solid comfort. Some of the chimneys did not work so well and then the draught was increased by the precarious expedient of an empty, headless barrel placed on top. This generally served for a short time; but the barrel was pretty sure to take fire and then there would be a grand excitement and much merriment over the frantic effort to extinguish the blaze.