Читать книгу Diary of an Enlisted Man - Lawrence Van Alstyne - Страница 3

Table of Contents

In the multitude of books written about the Civil War, very little is said of the enlisted man. His bravery and his loyalty are admitted and that is about all. Of his everyday life, the very thing his family and friends cared most to know about, there is hardly anything said.

It is to remedy this omission in some degree that the following pages are published. They were written by an enlisted man and are mostly about enlisted men. They are filled with details that history has no room for, and for that reason may have an interest quite their own.

They were written at different times, in different places, and under a great variety of circumstances and conditions. Some were written as the line halted for rest while marching from place to place, some while waiting for trains or other modes of transportation, but the most were written by the light of a candle or a smoldering camp-fire while my comrades, no more weary than I, were sleeping about me. All were written amid scenes of more or less confusion, and many times of great excitement. They were written because of a promise made to my parents that I would make notes of my wanderings and of the adventures I met with.

At first I found it an irksome task, taking time I really needed for rest; but as time went on the habit became fixed, and I did not consider the day's work done until I had written in my diary of the events that came with it.

The diary was kept in small pocket notebooks, of a size convenient to carry in my pocket, and be ever ready for use. There was never a lack of subjects to write about. Events crowded upon each other so fast that each day furnished plenty of material for the time I could give it. I had never been far from home. The sights I saw were new and strange to me and made deep impressions. These, as best I could, I transferred to the pages of my diary, so the friends at home could, in a way, see the sights I saw and that seemed so wonderful to me. When pages enough were written for a letter, I cut them out and sent them home to be read by any who cared to, after which they were strung together on a string and saved for me to read again, should I ever return to do it. When I did return I found the leaves had so accumulated as to make a large bundle. There was no need for me to read them at that time, for the story they told was burned too deep in my memory to be easily forgotten.

So I tied them in a bundle and put them away in an unused drawer of my desk, where they lay, unread and undisturbed for the next forty-five years.

But while the old diary lay hidden in my desk a new generation had crept upon the stage. We no longer occupied the center of it. One by one we had been crowded off, and our ranks were getting so thin we had to feel around for the touch of a comrade's elbow. Every year there were more comrades' graves to decorate, and every year there were fewer of us left to decorate them. At last we had met an enemy we could not even hope to conquer. With sadness we saw first one and then another called out, and they did not return. They had answered the last roll call, and it was only a question of a little time when the last name would be called, and the muster-out rolls be folded up and filed away.

It was with a feeling of ever-increasing loneliness that I untied the bundle and began to read the long-forgotten diary. In a little while I was a boy again, one of that great company that helped to make history read as it does. Almost half a century had suddenly rolled back and I was with Company B—"Bostwick's Tigers" we were called, not altogether on account of our fighting qualities, but because of the noise we sometimes made. I was having my share of the fun that was going, and was taking my share of the hard knocks as well.

I was never so absorbedly interested. I even forgot my meals. For weeks I thought of little else and did little else than read and copy those dim old pages. I read from them to any who would listen, and wondered why it did not stir their blood as it did my own.

But the reason is plain. To the listener it was hearsay. To me it was real. So it may be with the diary now it is printed. In the nature of things it cannot be to others what it is to me. It is a part of my life. My blood would not tingle as it does at the reading of another man's life. It is what historians had neither time nor space to write, the everyday life of an enlisted man in time of war.

L. V. A.

October, 1910.