It was on the last day of thirteen months of captivity that I re-entered our lines. All that I had seen and learnt was contained in about thirty days. Could these thirty days have been brought together, they would have formed an interesting and instructive month. But beside this one were twelve other months, that were a dreary, idle waste. They formed a year that had brought no pleasure, profit or instruction. Some who entered it young, came out with broken health and shortened lives; some who had entered it in middle age, came out with grey hair, impaired memory, and the decrepitude of premature old age. It was a year that had taken much from us and given to us little in return. A year of ever-disappointed hopes, of barren promises, of a blank and dreary retrospect. Contemplating it, we might almost reverse the meaning of our gently-chiding poet:
“Rich gift of God! A year of time!
What pomp of rise and shut of day—
What hues wherewith our northern clime
Makes autumn’s drooping woodlands gay—
What airs outblown from ferny dells,
And clover bloom, and sweet-brier smells—
What songs of brooks and birds—what fruits and flowers,
Green woods and moon-lit snows have in its round been ours.”