"Young mon, an' if ye don't be afther pickin' up a bit, it's my opinion ye'll be gathered home to your fathers purty soon."
I was sick with the same disease which slew more men than fell in actual battle. We had had a late fall campaign, and had suffered much from exposure, of which one instance may suffice:
We had been sent into Thoroughfare Gap to hold that mountain pass. Breaking camp there at daylight in a drenching rain, we marched all day long, through mud up to our knees, and soaked to the skin by the cold rain; at night we forded a creek waist-deep, and marched on with clothes frozen almost stiff; at one o'clock the next morning we lay down utterly exhausted, shivering helplessly, in wet clothes, without fire, and exposed to the north-west wind that swept the vast plain keen and cold as a razor. Whoever visits the Soldiers' Cemetery near Culpeper will there find a part of the sequel of that night-march; the remainder is scattered far and wide over the hills of Virginia, and in forgotten places among the pines.
Could we have had home care and home diet, many would have recovered. But what is to be done for a sick man whose only choice of diet must be made from pork, beans, sugar, and hard-tack? Home? Ah yes, if we only could get home for a month! Homesick? Well, no, not exactly. Still we were not entire strangers to the feelings of that poor recruit who was one day found by his lieutenant sitting on a fallen pine-tree in the woods, crying as if his heart would break.
"Why," said the lieutenant, "what are you crying for, you big baby, you?"
"I wish I was in my daddy's barn, boo, hoo!"
"And what would you do if you were?"
The poor fellow replied, between his sobs: "Why, if I was in my daddy's barn, I'd go into the house mighty quick!"
