Among the first volunteers to join our Newton Company was the Reverend William L. Gilman, a minister of the Universalist denomination. To us he was Corporal Gilman of Company K, doing his duty as a non-commissioned officer quietly and well. On the 10th of December, 1862, the Colonel was in the dumps. He had been for two months wrestling with the medical authorities of the corps, and the medical authorities had near about killed him. Upon the eve of a movement and a battle, they refused permission to send our sick to hospital, and ordered our surgeons to follow the movement. More than twenty men were very sick in our hospital tent, and the steward objected to the heavy load which would fall to him if he were left alone in charge.
At this juncture appeared Corporal Gilman with a sad countenance, and told how disappointed he was to find that his services seemed to be of no value, and to ask if some position could not be found in which he might have the satisfaction of feeling that he was of use to somebody. A brief consultation with the Surgeon told the Colonel that the corporal was in no state for marching or fighting, that his despondency was the effect of a disordered liver, and thereupon he was detailed to the military command of the patients in hospital, and before the regiment left he was fully instructed as to the duty required of him. To Corporal Gilman’s activity during the five days of our absence, is due a large share of the credit of saving the lives of those entrusted to his care. Shamefully neglected by the division surgeon who promised to visit them, and who even falsely said that he had visited them, these sick men would have died of starvation but for the unwearying devotion of their two non-commissioned officers; and when the regiment returned, Gilman himself was well, and had recovered that cheeriness which was his natural temper, and which never afterward deserted him, even when mangled and dying on the field of Gettysburg.
But after all there was some foundation for those youthful views. There were men who could stand up against their own livers, and there were times of general jollity.
Making a neighborly call at the headquarters of an Irish regiment, our Adjutant found there quite a number of officers, the greater number of them sitting or reclining on the ground, which formed the tent floor, among them Captain Hart, A. A. General of the Irish Brigade.
Of course the canteen was at once produced, and a single glass which was to go the rounds with the canteen. The whiskey was of the “ragged edge” variety, from the commissary stores, and it required a stout throat to drink it half-and-half with water; but when our adjutant, to whom by reason of infirmity of the lungs whiskey was like milk, filled the little glass with clear spirit and tossed it down his throat, there was a murmur of admiring surprise which found expression in Hart’s reverent look and in his exclamation, “Oh, sir! you ought to belong to the Irish Brigade, for it’s a beautiful swallow you have!”
But the Irish had no monopoly of light-hearted soldiers. Dana of “ours” was to the battalion what Tupper says a babe is to the household—a well-spring of joy. Full of healthy life and spirits, he bubbled over with jokes and pranks and mirth, and while no story of the 32d could be complete without some stories of him, no one book could suffice to contain them all.
Sent out with a party to corduroy a road, he announced himself at the farm house near by as General Burnside, and demanded quarters, got them, and fared sumptuously.
Detailed as acting quartermaster he kept no accounts, and how he settled with his department no man knoweth to this day. The demand of the ordnance department for property returns, although frequently repeated, were quietly ignored, until the chief wrote to him: “Having no replies to my repeated demands for your accounts, I have this day addressed a communication to the 2d Auditor of the Treasury, requesting him to withhold farther payments to you.” To which D. at once replied: “Dear Sir,—Yours of the —th is received. What did the 2d Auditor say?”
A representative of the Christian Commission in clerical dress and stove-pipe hat was distributing lemons to the bilious soldiers, but refused to give or sell one to Dana, who thereupon proposed to arrest him as a deserter from our army or a spy of the enemy’s; and when the gentleman asserted that he was enlisted only in “the army of the Lord”—“Well, you’ve straggled a good ways from that,” was the surly rejoinder.
Sergeant Hyde of K Company was a Yankee given to the invention of labor-saving contrivances, and was not fond of walking two miles under a big log, which was then the ordinary process of obtaining fire-wood. He thought that he might get his fuel with less labor, from the generous pile which always flanked the surgeon’s tent. Getting one of his comrades, in the darkness of night, to draw off the attention of the headquarters’ negro servants, Hyde secured a boss log and escaped with it to his hut, and there, with the aid of a newly-issued hatchet, proceeded to demolish his log beyond the possibility of recognition.