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 33

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Camp Second N. H. Regiment,

Chickamoxen, Md., Nov. 27, 1861.

FOR amateurs, the association of house builders I joined has done a good job. It is on the same general plan as most of the others. First, you start in to build a log cabin. When the walls are four or five feet high, you stop, fasten your tent on top—and there you are. It is astonishing, the room you gain over a plain tent. On the right-hand corner fronting the street is a fireplace—a big one—built, with its chimney, of small logs laid cob-house fashion and thickly plastered with Maryland mud. The bottom is sunk a foot or more, and around the front is a one-log pen or barrier, which serves a double purpose. It is just right for a seat before the fire, and it keeps our thick carpet of straw out of mischief. When we are all fixed up we’ll have bunks and a table and shelves and pegs and a gun rack and everything required in a well-regulated family. I am writing by the light of a candle. Roberts [Orsino,] one of the tent’s crew, is warming himself at the fire and going over all the songs he has in stock, and the rest of the gang seem to have no higher ambition, just at present, than to “break up” both me and him.

Sunday our company went up to “the landing” to help unload two or three small steamers that bring our supplies down from Washington. The landing is at Rum Point, over three miles from here, but as near as boats can get to us, on account of the rebel batteries. As we did not start to return until after dark, we had a sweet time of it. The roads here are now nothing but a ditch through woods and fields, filled with mud of terrible adhesive qualities and of fabulous depth. I thought, for the life of me, I should never get home. If I tried to follow the road, I wallowed up to my knees in mud. If I switched off to one side or the other, I had, in addition to the mud, a butting match with every tree in the county. It was pitch dark when I landed in camp just ahead of a smart shower.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in New Hampshire, and we New Hampshire boys out here on the Potomac will observe it in a befitting manner. In our tent we have a big fat goose up on the shelf, with a rabbit- or chicken-pie or two and a few other fixings. Beat that if you can.