Then came the battle of Gettysburg, and although his company escaped with only a few wounded, it was here he first realized the ghastly horror of a battlefield after the fight is over, and how the dead are buried.
When his next letter reached the sad-hearted one at home, no mention was made of this experience, and when she wrote asking why he had never told her how a battleground looked, or anything about it, he replied: "Not for worlds would I tell you how we bury the dead, or how they looked, or anything of the sickening details. Please do not read them in the papers, for it will do you no good, and cause you needless suffering. I wish to keep misery from you. Think of me only as doing my duty, and try to believe (as I do) that I shall come back to you alive and well."
For the next six months he had no battles to face—only skirmishing and picket duty. When Christmas came it brought him two boxes of good things to gladden his heart. One was from his dear old mother, and one was from Liddy, and tucked away in that, between four pairs of blue socks knit by her fair hands, was a loving letter and a picture of herself.
Almost a month after came the battle of Tracy City and the fall of brave Captain Upson. There were others wounded, but none of his company were killed. It was here Manson received his first promotion to a corporal's position, and he was afterward made sergeant. In the spring that followed, and almost one year from the day he first told Liddy of his love, came the battle of Boyd's Trail. Five days after, when the moon was full one night, he wrote by the light of a camp fire: "Do you remember one year ago to-day, and where we were and what I said? I little realized that day what was in store for me. One thing I must tell you, however, and that is you can never know how much comfort it has been to me to live over all the happy hours we have had together. Every little word and look of love from you has come back to me again and again in my long, lonesome hours of picket duty, and to-night as I sit by the camp fire and see the moon shining through the trees I can recall just how I felt the first time I kissed you, when the same moon seemed to be laughing at me. Do you remember one night when we were driving across the plains on our way back from a little party over to Marion, and you sang that 'Meet Me by Moonlight' ballad? That was three years ago, and yet I can almost hear your voice now."
When this letter reached Liddy she read it in tears.
For the next year it was with Manson as with all that slowly decreasing company—one unending round of nervous strain, long marches, sharp fighting, or, worse yet—carrying the wounded from the battlefield and burying the dead. They lived poorly, slept on the ground or in the mud at times, and became accustomed to filth and stench, indifferent to danger and hardened to death. When a comrade fell those who knew him best said: "Poor fellow, he's gone," and buried him without a prayer; but the dead who were personally unknown awakened no more feeling than so many leaves fallen by the wayside. It could not well be otherwise, for such is war. Individual cases of heroism were common enough, and passed almost unnoticed; for they were all brave men who came to fight and die if need be, and no less was expected.
War makes strange bedfellows, and forms unexpected friendships. It was after the battle of Gettysburg, when the Tenth Army Corps remained in camp for several months, and one night while on picket duty, that Manson met with a curious adventure, and made the acquaintance of a fellow-soldier by the name of Pullen, belonging to a Maine regiment, whose existence, and the tie thus formed, eventually led to a sequence of events of serious import. The enemy were encamped but a few miles away, and that most dastardly part of warfare, the firing upon pickets from ambush, was of nightly occurrence. Manson's beat that night was over a low hill covered with scrub oak, and across part of a narrow valley, through which wound a small, marsh-bordered stream. The night was sultry, and the dampness of the swamp formed in a shallow strata of fog, filling this valley, but not rising above the level of the uplands. To add to the weirdness of his surroundings, the thin crescent of a new moon threw a faint light over all and outlined the winding turns of this mist-filled gorge. Away to the northward a belt of dark clouds emitted frequent flashes of heat lightning, and occasional sharp reports along the line bespoke possible death lurking in every thicket. Keeping always in shadow, and oft pausing to listen, Manson slowly traversed his beat, waiting only at either end to exchange a whispered "All's well!" with the next sentry.
What a vigil! And what a menace seemed hidden behind every bush or spoke in every sound! The faint creak of a tree as the night wind stirred the branches; the rustle of leaves on the ground or the breaking of a twig as some prowling animal moved about; the flight of a bird, disturbed at its rest; the hoot of an owl on the hillside or the croak of a frog in the swamp were all magnified tenfold by the half-darkness and the sense of danger near. One end of his beat ended at the brook and here he waited longest, for the sentry he met there was, like himself, hardly out of his teens, and unused to war. A bond of fellowship sprang into existence almost at sight, and made them brothers in feeling at once.
It was while whispering together beside this brook, and oppressed by the suspense of night and danger near, that they detected a sound of more than usual ill-omen, and that, the certain one that some creature had stepped into the stream above, and was cautiously and slowly wading in it. Hardly breathing, and bending low, the better to catch every sound that came, they listened with beating hearts until it ceased. Once they had detected the click of stones striking together as if moved by a human foot and twice caught the faint plash of a bush or limb of tree dropping into the water. Then the sounds ceased, and only the faint murmur of that slow-running stream disturbed the silence.
For a few moments they waited there, and then together crept up out of the gorge. Just as they emerged from the pall of the fog, and where the moon's thin disk still outlined that narrow white-blanketed valley, they paused, looking across, above, below and all around, and listening as intently as two human beings so environed would when believing danger near. And as they looked and listened for moments that seemed hours, suddenly, scarce five rods away, they saw a man slowly emerged from the bush-covered bank, rapidly cross this narrow gorge, apparently walking on the fog, and disappear in the dark thicket on the other side!