It was easier for a hungry soldier to pull a trigger, than for hungry mules to pull a wagon load. My judgment accepted his reasoning, but my appetite was not so easily convinced—so I bribed him with ten cents to look the other way while I stole an ear. I ate it raw. It was good enough that way, and I wasn’t proud.
I hope the mules enjoyed what was left, as well as I enjoyed that ear.
I have seen the boys dig the grains of corn from the stiff mud where the mules had fed, and rubbing the mud off, eat them without parching. They had the best of seasoning, a good appetite. We often thought with the poet:
“The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year.”
On the 27th of October we were ordered down to Brown’s Ferry to co-operate with a force who, before daylight that morning, had glided down the river in a fleet of boats—rounding Moccasin Point, and slipping past the rebel pickets without disturbing their rest, effected a landing at the Ferry, and constructed a pontoon bridge on which we crossed.
Here we waited, to hail the approach of, and smooth the way for, General Hooker, who was moving up from Bridgeport, Alabama, with the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps, driving the rebels out of the valley south of the river, thus shortening our cracker line to twenty-two miles.
We lay guarding the approach to the Ferry; and soon the Veterans from the Army of the Potomac began to file past. At this the battery of twenty pounders on Lookout opened fire and rained their misshapen fragments of iron around us in a very intrusive manner.
To be sure they were aimed at Hooker’s men, and not at us, who were lying down; and if any of us were hit it should not count. But unfortunately it did count with fatal effect to many a brave comrade.
The only sort of protection in our line was a large white-oak tree, some distance to the right of our company, and I viewed with envy two soldiers sitting on the safe side of that tree.
I very soon ceased to grudge them the position; for a shell burst close beside them, a piece struck a gun, drove the breech pin through the knee of one of them, and sent the naked barrel humming over our heads. A large fragment struck the other man, tearing his arm off at the shoulder, causing his death in about twenty minutes.