WE START ON A WEARY JOURNEY
The twenty-ninth of May dawned clear and bright in pleasant contrast to the violent storm which had raged the day before. Long ere daybreak, the camp was alive with hurrying men, for the first detachment was to march under command of Major Campbell, and the sun had scarce risen above the horizon when the gates were thrown open and the troops filed out. Six hundred of them there were, with two fieldpieces and fifty wagons of provision, and very smart they looked as they fell into rank beyond the bridge and set off westward. The whole camp was there to see them go, and cheered them right heartily, for we were all of us glad that the long waiting and delay had come to an end at last.
All day we could see them here and there in the intervales of the forest pushing their way up a steep hill not two miles from the camp, and darkness came before they passed the summit. Three wagons were utterly destroyed in the passage, and new ones had to be sent from camp to replace them, while many more were all but ruined. Spiltdorph and I walked out to the place the next day and found it an almost perpendicular rock, though two hundred men and a company of miners had been at work for near a week trying to make it passable. We could see the detachment slowly cutting its way through the valley below, and I reflected gloomily that, at so slow a rate, the summer would be well-nigh gone before the army could reach its destination. Indeed, I believe it would have gone to pieces on this first spur of the Alleghenies, had not Lieutenant Spendelow, of the seamen, discovered a valley round its foot. Accordingly, a party of a hundred men was ordered out to clear a road there, and worked to such purpose that at the end of two days an extremely good one was completed, falling into the road made by Major Campbell about a mile beyond the mountain.
On the seventh, Sir Peter Halket and the Forty-Eighth marched, in the midst of a heavy storm, and at daybreak the next day it was our turn. Under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Burton, all of the independent companies and rangers left the camp, not, indeed, making so brilliant an appearance as the regulars,—who stood on either side and laughed at us,—but with a clearer comprehension of the work before us and a hearty readiness to do it. It was not until the tenth that the third division under Colonel Dunbar left the fort, and finally, on the eleventh, the general joined the army where it had assembled at Spendelow camp, five miles from the start.
Our tent that night was a gloomy place, for I think most of us, for the first time since the campaign opened, began to doubt its ultimate success. We soon finished with the food, and were smoking in gloomy silence, when Peyronie came in, and after a glance around at our faces, broke into a laugh.
"Ma foi!" he cried, "I thought I had chanced upon a meeting of our Philadelphia friends,—they of the broad hats and sober coats,—and yet I had never before known them to go to war."
"Do you call this going to war?" cried Waggoner. "I'm cursed if I do!"
Peyronie laughed louder than ever, and Waggoner motioned him to the pipes and tobacco.
"By God, Peyronie!" he said. "I believe you would laugh in the face of the devil."
Peyronie filled his pipe, chuckling to himself the while, and when he had got it to drawing nicely, settled himself upon a stool.