CHAPTER IV.
OUR FIRST WINTER QUARTERS.
"Well, fellows, I tell you what! I've heard a good deal about the balmy breezes and sunny skies of Old Virginny, but if this is a specimen of the sort of weather they have in these parts, I, for one, move we 'right-about-face' and march home."
So saying, Phil Hammer got up from under the scrub-pine, where he had made his bed for the night, shaking the snow from his blanket and the cape of his overcoat, while a loud "Ha! ha!" and an oft-repeated "What do you think of this, boys?" rang along the hillside on which we had found our first camping-place on "Old Virginia's Shore."
The weather had played us a most deceptive and unpleasant trick. We had landed the day before, as my journal says, "at Belle Plains, at a place called Platt's Landing," having been brought down from Washington on the steamer "Louisiana;" had marched some three or four miles inland in the direction of Falmouth, and had halted and camped for the night in a thick undergrowth of scrub-pine and cedar. The day of our landing was remarkably fair. The skies were so bright, the air was so soft and balmy, that we were rejoiced to find what a pleasant country it was we were getting into, to be sure; but the next morning, when we drummer-boys woke the men with our loud reveille, we were all of Phil's opinion, that the sunny skies and balmy breezes of this new land were all a miserable fiction. For as man after man opened his eyes at the loud roll of our drums, and the shout of the orderly: "Fall in, Company D, for roll-call!" he found himself covered with four inches of snow, and more coming down. Fortunately, the bushes had afforded us some protection; they were so numerous and so thick that one could scarcely see twenty rods ahead of him, and with their great overhanging branches had kindly kept the falling snow out of our faces, at least while we slept.
In Winter-Quarters.
And now began a busy time. We were to build winter quarters—a work for which we were but poorly prepared, either by nature or by circumstance. Take any body of men out of civilized life, put them into the woods to shift for themselves, and they are generally as helpless as children. As for ourselves, we were indeed "Babes in the Wood." At least half the regiment knew nothing of wood-craft, having never been accustomed to the use of the axe. It was a laughable sight to see some of the men from the city try to cut down a tree! Besides, we were poorly equipped. Axes were scarce, and worth almost their weight in gold. We had no "shelter-tents." Most of us had "poncho" blankets; that is to say, a piece of oilcloth about five feet by four, with a slit in the middle. But we found our ponchos very poor coverings for our cabins; for the rain just would run down through that unfortunate hole in the middle; and then, too, the men needed their oilcloths when they went on picket, for which purpose they had been particularly intended. This circumstance gave rise to frequent discussion that day: whether to use the poncho as a covering for the cabin, and get soaked on picket, or to save the poncho for picket, and cover the cabin with brushwood and clay? Some messes[1] chose the one alternative, others the other; and as the result of this preference, together with our ignorance of wood-craft and the scarcity of axes, we produced on that hillside the oddest looking winter quarters a regiment ever built! Such an agglomeration of cabins was never seen before nor since. I am positive no two cabins on all that hillside had the slightest resemblance to each other.
There, for instance, was a mess over in Company A, composed of men from the city. They had one kind of cabin, an immense square structure of pine-logs, about seven feet high, and covered over the top, first with brushwood, and then coated so heavily with clay that I am certain the roof must have been two feet thick at the least. It was hardly finished before some wag had nicknamed it "Fortress Monroe."