Читать книгу A Minor War History Compiled from a Soldier Boy's Letters to "the Girl I Left Behind Me": 1861-1864 - Martin A. Haynes - Страница 30

Table of Contents

Hill Top, St. Charles County, Md.,

October 28, 1861.

YOU will take note that we have changed our location at last. We are now forty or fifty miles below Washington, on the Potomac river, below Budd’s Point. The other side of the river is lined with rebel batteries for a distance of ten miles, up and down, and we are here with ten or twelve thousand men to watch them. We have cavalry and artillery with us. With our regiment is Doubleday’s battery of 12- and 32-pounders. Most of the Fort Sumter men are in this battery. We left Bladensburg Thursday and got here last night—a march of four days. As we were in heavy marching order, all our earthly possessions strapped or hung to us in some way, you can be sure it was a pretty tired crowd that landed in here.

Tuesday Morning.—I tried to write last night, but it was so cold I had to give up. We are camped down in a deep hollow, where the sun doesn’t get in till pretty late. Every morning the ground is white with frost. It takes all our dry goods to keep us anywhere near comfortable, day or night. Our grub is neither rich nor varied, but it appears to agree with me—with what I have been able to pick up on the side. A man who is enterprising can occasionally get hold of a piece of fresh meat. Until last night, since leaving Bladensburg, every man has been his own cook. Our tin plates served very well as stew- or fry-pans, and coffee drank out of the tin dipper in which it was boiled on the coals of the campfire, has a flavor all its own. But last night the company cooks got into action again and served out boiled corned beef, hardbread, and coffee. As it never rains but it pours, our sutler also got along and opened up shop.

Guard duty in this place is not what it was at Bladensburg. Our company goes on picket today down by the mouth of the creek we are camped on [Nanjamoy,] to watch the rebels over across the river. Mail will leave here three times a week.

Yesterday the rebel batteries were busy throwing shells over to this side of the river, but our regiment was far out of range of fire. Before we came down here the rebels used to come over and visit and forage and gather recruits and scout around with impunity.

The infantry of this division consists of our own brigade—the First and Eleventh Massachusetts, Twenty-sixth Pennsylvania, and the Second—and General Sickles’ “Excelsior Brigade” of five New York regiments. The regiments are strung along for a distance of probably seven or eight miles, we being the farthest south.