When I made bold to personally address General Burnside, I am afraid that I began in a rather nervous voice and manner to unfold my plan of going into General Lee's lines again. At first he looked at me a little incredulously, then, as he recognized me as being one of the telegraph and signal men about his headquarters, he said: "Why, my dear boy, I couldn't send you on such an errand as that."
But I persisted, and, to assure him further, I told him I had been there before, and wasn't afraid to go again.
"You surprise me," said the General, genially. "Come into my room and I'll talk it over a little."
I followed him into his room, where we found at least half a dozen officers already gathered; indeed, there was always a crowd of them around headquarters. While General Burnside greeted them cordially, I stood at attention, at a respectful distance, in one corner of the room, where I was wholly unobserved.
While waiting for the General to clear up the business with his callers—which, by the way, seemed to me a long, long while—I heard, among others, one little story that I do not think has ever been printed.
Some officers were quietly discussing the recent battle; indeed, this was a subject that would not down. It seemed as if the ghosts of the thousands of dead soldiers who were slaughtered before Marye's Heights and at the pontoons were haunting the memories of our Generals.
And, by the way, the boys who died doing their thankless duty at the pontoons are almost forgotten, though they are almost as numerous as those who charged up the heights. Well, one of the officers whom I heard talking on the subject that day was, to my mind then, quite an ordinary-looking man. He was a little bit stoop-shouldered; at least, his careless, loose dress gave him that appearance, while with his muddy boots and spectacles and generally unsoldierly bearing, he gave me the impression that he was a Brigade Surgeon. Another of the officers, speaking of the failure of the army, made some remark about the left not doing its share. At this the Surgeon jerked up his head and his eyes showed fire through his spectacles, as he said: "I want you to understand that my division on the left broke Jackson's line in our charge, and, if we had been sustained, the result would have been different."
There was a good deal more of this sort of talk, pro and con, to which I paid no attention at the time, because it seemed as if everybody that I heard speak was explaining something or finding fault with another, and it, of course, became tiresome. There was lots of this sort of thing around headquarters which we on the outside overheard.
One little circumstance indelibly impressed this one man's talk on my mind at the time. Holding up his battered, old, slouched hat, and sticking his bony finger through a bullet-hole, in the crown, he said, in a reply to a suggestion that "there was no enemy in front of him, as there was at Marye's Heights"—"I found it hot enough in my front."
After he left I asked who the doctor was. The man on duty at the door looked at me with disgust as he said: "That's no damned doctor, man; don't you know General Meade?"