We lost only a few men at Fredericksburg but we gained a great experience. The battle took place in December and after it the army went into winter quarters. A field officer from one of the old regiments of the brigade was detailed to command us in the protracted absence of our colonel. He knew our defects. We needed drill. He gave it to us without stint and worked us as we had never been worked before—company and skirmish drill in the morning, battalion drill all the afternoon, so that after the evening dress parade we were as weary as bricklayers. Nothing escaped his notice; he made you feel that his eyes were on you personally and his orders came in a sharp, explosive tone that made men jump. After an hour's hard work on the drill ground, some of us would grow careless, and then that rasping voice would startle the whole battalion. "Why don't that man hold that gun properly?" and a half dozen muskets would straighten up with a jerk.
Under our own colonel the discipline of the regiment had been excessive in unimportant details and lax in essentials. All this was changed. We felt ourselves ruled with an iron hand, yet with just discrimination, so that while we stood in awe of our new commander we learned to like him greatly; the more so when we found that he liked us, and in a lurid, unrepeatable epigram expressed his opinion of what might have been made of us if he could have had us from the first. Then, too, he looked carefully after our comfort and our necessities. Some rascally quartermaster had nearly starved us with bad rations. He quickly stopped that. Moreover, to our great satisfaction, new rifles for the regiment arrived. We gladly bade good-bye to our old "stuffed clubs," and we had occasional target practice with our new and effective weapons. A fresh spirit came into us; we imagined ourselves fit for anything.
Yet the regiment was really like a great boy who begins to think himself a man. The weeding process was still incomplete and progressing. Captains and lieutenants disappeared one by one. Some who were otherwise competent had broken down in health; others had been proved unfit. Their places were filled by promotions, mainly of non-commissioned officers.
Our experience was precisely that of almost every volunteer regiment in the army. After the first twelve months' service the line was usually transformed. Serjeants and corporals, men who had been appointed because of fitness rather than chosen because of popularity or influence came into command as company officers. In much less than a year not a single one of our original field officers remained, and only three of the ten original captains of companies.
As to the men in general, the weeding process showed some results worthy of record. It proved that very few men over forty years of age were fit for war, either physically or morally, and that boys from eighteen to twenty made excellent soldiers. It was not simply that the young fellows were more reckless, but they never worried about coming danger. They were more cheerful; they fretted less over privations; they actually endured hardships better than older and stronger men. Our losses among the boys were chiefly in battle; our losses among the old men were mainly by sickness and physical exhaustion. Doubtless it might be different with a body of men carefully selected and gradually inured to a soldier's life; but in our volunteer regiments, hastily enlisted and composed of men whose habit of life was suddenly changed, the facts as observed in our experience would, I think, always hold good.
The monotony of camp life was broken by frequent picket duty. This was sometimes dangerous and often trying, especially to the non-commissioned officers on whom special responsibility rested; yet in pleasant weather at least, it was a welcome change from the dull routine of camp. It was also an essential part of our education. Pickets are the antennæ of an army. In the face of the enemy the antennæ become formidable as skirmishers. A picket line, in case of need is quickly transformed into a skirmish line. Nothing teaches vigilance, the use of independent judgment, prompt action in emergency, and at the same time strict subordination, like outpost or skirmish work. We had some exciting and some amusing experiences.
One night the line ran through a swamp. It was moonlight, and in the small hours toward morning things looked weird and ghostly. In visiting my sentries I came to one of our boys, a mere stripling, whom I found in a state of high excitement. "Serjeant", he said, "I wish I could be relieved; I'm afraid to stay here." I asked him what the trouble was and he answered, "There's a wolf out there," pointing to a dismal clump of bushes. "I saw him come out of the woods and go across the swamp into those bushes. He was close to me. I do wish I could be relieved; I'm afraid to stay here alone!"
I knew it was a trick of the imagination, or possibly a stray fox, and told him so; but it was of no use. The poor fellow's terror was pitiful. Yet that same boy was afterward as bold as a lion when bullets were flying thick and men were falling about him.
Toward the end of January there were rumours in the air. They furnished food for camp gossip, and were beginning to leave us sceptical, when orders came suddenly, and we found ourselves one gray morning actually on the move—where or why we knew not, though it was clear that no ordinary enterprise was at hand; for the whole army was in motion, and in all our experience, never had a march been so forced. It was hurry, hurry, almost at a trot, with rests so infrequent and so short that men, from sheer inability to keep the pace began to drop out of the ranks. The roads were good, but the sky was overcast and when, early in the evening we halted and pitched our shelter tents for the night, the weather was threatening. Before morning a cold, northeast storm had set in; all day long the icy rain poured down. The Virginia roads were speedily melting into muddy creeks. The movement of artillery or pontoons was fast becoming an impossibility; but at nightfall a desperate attempt was made. Our regiment was among the unfortunates detailed to extricate the ponderous pontoon train from its muddy fetters. Imagine a bridge of boats loaded upon waggons, each great flat-bottomed boat about twenty feet long, and alternating with the boats, waggon-trucks loaded with bridge timbers, six or eight horses to each of these unwieldy vehicles, and the whole train hopelessly mired in a rough wood road; wheels sunk to the hubs, horses floundering helplessly, some of them half dead with their terrible work; the night dark, the half-frozen rain pouring pitilessly—and then perhaps you may picture the task which was ours. Muskets, equipments, even overcoats were left at our tents. We were marched about a mile to the place where the pontoons were stalled; ropes were made fast to the waggons and, with a hundred men to each, we dragged them one after another out of the woods into open ground. There they sank more hopelessly than ever. The force of men had to be doubled. We could have drawn them far more easily without wheels; but at last, when it was nearly midnight they were all ranged upon solid ground on a little knoll.
As to ourselves, we were drenched with the rain, bruised with our falls, half frozen with the cold, and plastered with mud from head to foot. And in this plight we were kept standing idly for a bitter hour, waiting for another division of the pontoon train. But it never came, and finally we were permitted to return to our tents where we found everything, even our blankets soaked with the merciless rain.