For two days and nights we were cooped up in those miserable boats. We had no fire, and we suffered from the cold. We had no water for thirty-six hours, and, of course, no coffee; and what is life to a soldier without coffee? All were sea-sick, too, for the weather was rough. And so, what with hunger and thirst, cold and sea-sickness, we landed one evening at Baltimore more dead than alive.
No sooner were we well down the gangplank than the crowd of apple and pie women that stood on the wharf made quick sales and large profits. Then we marched away to a "soldiers' retreat" and were fed. Fed! We never tasted so grand a supper as that before or since—"salt horse," dry bread and coffee! The darkies that carried around the great cans of the latter were kept pretty busy for a while, I can tell you; and they must have thought:
"Dem sodjers, dar, must be done gone starved, dat's sartin. Nebber seed sech hungry men in all my bawn days,—nebber!"
After supper we were lodged in a great upper room of a large building, having bunks ranged around the four sides of it, and in the middle an open space, which was soon turned to account; for one of the boys strung up his fiddle, which he had carried on his knapsack for full two years, on every march and through every battle we had been in, and with the help of this we proceeded to celebrate our late "change of front" with music and dancing until the small hours of the morning.
The Charge on the Cakes.
Down through the streets of Baltimore we march the next day, with our blackened and tattered flags a-flying, mustering only one hundred and eighty men out of the one thousand who marched through those same streets nearly three years before. We find a train of cars awaiting us, which we gladly enter, making no complaint that we are stowed away in box or cattle cars, instead of passenger coaches, for we understand that Uncle Sam cannot afford any luxuries for his boys, and we have been used to roughing it. Nor do we complain, either, that we have no fire, although we have just come out of a warm climate, and the snow is a foot deep at Baltimore, and is getting deeper every hour as we steam away northward. Toward evening we pass Harrisburg, giving "three cheers for Andy Curtin," as the State Capitol comes in sight. Night draws on, and the boys one by one begin to bunk down on the floor, wrapped in their great-coats and blankets. But I cannot lie down or sleep until we have passed a certain way-station, from which it is but two miles across the hills to my home. I stand at the door of the car, shivering and chilled to the bone, patiently waiting and watching as village after village rushes by in the bright moonlight, until at long last we reach the well-known little station at the hour of midnight. And then, as I look across the snow-clad moonlit hills, toward the old red farmhouse where father and mother and sisters are all sleeping soundly, with never a thought of my being so near, I fall to thinking, and wondering, and wishing with a bounding heart, as the train dashes on between the mountain and the river, and bears me again farther and farther away from home. Then rolling myself up in my blanket, and drawing the cape of my overcoat about my head, I lie down on the car floor beside Andy, and am soon sound asleep.
The following evening we landed at Elmira, New York, where we were at once put on garrison duty. Why we had been taken out of the field and sent to a distant Northern city, we never could discover, and we had seen too much service to think of asking questions which the mysterious pigeon-holes of the War Department alone could answer. But we always deemed it a pity that we were not left in the field until the great civil war came to an end with the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, and that we had no part in the final gathering of the troops at Washington, where the grand old Army of the Potomac passed in review for the last time.
But so it was, that after some months of monotonous garrison duty at Elmira, the great and good news came at last one day that peace had been declared, and that the great war was over! My young readers can scarcely imagine what joy instantly burst forth all over the land. Bells were rung all day long, bonfires burned, and people paraded the streets half the night, and everybody was glad beyond possibility of expression. And among the joyful thousands all over the land, the Boys in Blue were probably the gladdest of all; for was not the war over now, and would not "Johnny come marching home?"