While some men tugged at the ropes or drove in stakes for the guy-lines, others were busy bringing from the wagons rolls of blankets and huge trusses of straw. Even before the roof was secure scores of rude beds were being spread on the trampled grass underneath.
Bearded and spectacled men, dressed after the fashion of officers, yet clearly not soldiers at all, were directing everything now. Among them, here and there, flitted young women, clad also in a sort of uniform, who seemed busiest of all.
No, this was decidedly different from a circus tent. The thunder of the batteries on the other side of the ridge was alone enough to throw a solemn meaning over this long, barn-like house of ropes and cloths. It was the brigade hospital-tent, and the hundreds of active hands at work could hardly hope to have it ready before it was needed.
It was the morning of the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness. The men of Boyce's brigade knew only vaguely, by hearsay, of what had happened on that terrible yesterday. They themselves, forming the rear-guard of the great army, had been nearly the last to cross the Rapidan on the swinging pontoon bridge of Germania ford. They had had a night's forced march; a two hours' nap in the open starlight; a hasty bite of rations at half-past three in the morning, and now this plunge in the chilly twilight of sunrise down into the unknown.
There had been, just before the general advance across the Rapidan, a wholesale shaking-up of army organization. Two whole corps had been abolished, and their strength distributed among the three remaining corps. Regiments found themselves suddenly torn from their old associates, and brigaded with strangers. Their pet officers disappeared, and others took their places whom the men did not know and were disposed to dislike.
To add to this discontent, there was an understanding that their leaders had been entrapped into this Wilderness fighting. Certainly it was no place which an invading army would have chosen for battle.
It was a vast, sprawling forest district, densely covered with low timber, scrub-oak, dwarf junipers, and tangled cedars and pines, all knit together breast-high and upward with interlacing wild vines, and foul underfoot with swamp or thicket.
In this gloomy and sinister wilderness men did not know where they were, nor whom they were fighting. Whole commands were lost in the impenetrable woods. Mounted orderlies could not get about through the underbrush, and orders sent out were never delivered.
Though gulches and steep ravines abounded, cutting sharp gashes through the forest, there were no hills upon which a general and his keen-eyed staff might perch themselves and get an idea of how the land about them lay. The Confederates had plenty of this local knowledge, and used it to terrible purpose. The invaders could only put their heads down, and strive to crush their way blindly through.
After a little, the drummer-boy put his snare-drum in the wagon where the other instruments were, and started off up the ridge, to see what the general and his staff had been observing earlier in the morning.