For Water, Stable, and Tattoo.
For Taps—and all was still.
I hear it sound the Sick-Call grim,
And see the men in line,
With faces wry as they drink down
Their whiskey and quinine.”
A partial description of the daily programme of the rank and file of the army in the monotony of camp life, more especially as it was lived during the years 1861, ’62, and ’63, covers the subject-matter treated in this chapter. I do not expect it to be all new to the outside public even, who have attended the musters of the State militia, and have witnessed something of the routine that is followed there. This routine was the same in the Union armies in many respects, only with the latter there was a reality about the business, which nothing but stern war can impart, and which therefore makes soldiering comparatively uninteresting in State camp—such, at least, is the opinion of old campaigners.
The private soldiers in every arm of the service had many experiences in common in camp life, so that it will not be profitable to describe each in detail, but where the routine differs I shall be more entertaining and exact by adhering to the branch with which I am the most familiar, viz.: the light artillery; and this I shall do, and, in so doing, shall narrate not the routine of my own company alone, but essentially of that branch of the service throughout the army as artillerymen saw and lived it.
Beginning the army day, then, the first bugle-call blown was one known in artillery tactics as the Assembly of Buglers, to sound which the corporal or sergeant of the guard would call up the bugler.