“Sweet Alice Ben Bolt,” “Hazel Dell,” “Annie Laurie,” “Kathleen Mavourneen,” “Tenting Tonight,” “The Faded Coat of Blue,” “The Vacant Chair,” “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” “Write Me a Letter from Home,” etc., etc., and an evening camp concert, with perhaps a hundred or more voices in the choruses would wind up with “The Shining Shore,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
CHAPTER VI.
OUR FIGHTING COLONEL.
After the Bull Run campaign our regiment was detailed for garrison duty again and sent to some forts near Arlington where we remained for a long time.
Our colonel (with a foreign military experience?) was relieved of his command immediately after Bull Run and there came to us a commander who proceeded to jerk things straight in the regiment. His name was Jeremiah N. G. Whistler and he had been in the regular army since he was a day old, having been born in camp. He was all military, through and through, and a disciplinarian of disciplinarians.
He drilled the regiment six days in the week and then had a Sunday inspection, and succeeded in bringing the command to a high state of perfection. He was a man of fiery temper and when anything touched it off he could let out a string of oaths—of which he had a choice and inexhaustible selection—that would produce a sulphurous atmosphere.
One Sunday morning when our company was marching by the colonel’s tent to go out for inspection he noticed one of the men swinging his left arm, and the next thing that the Co. H man knew the colonel had him by the coat collar and was shaking him. Then leading him back to his place in the ranks admonished him about repeating the arm swinging again.
But taken all in all he was a good officer and when we went to the front again, excited the admiration of the men by his bravery under fire.