Many are dead and gone....
“We’re tenting to-night on the old camp-ground,...
Tenting to-night, tenting to-night.
Tenting to-night on the old camp-ground.”
All the spirit of this army was graver than it had been a year ago, than it had been six months ago. During the past winter a strong religious fervour had swept it. This evening, in the Wilderness, in many a command there was prayer and singing of hymns. Swaths of earth, black copses of cedar and gum, divided one congregation from another. One was singing while another prayed; the hymns were different, but the wide night had room for all—for the hymns and for “Tenting to-night,” and for the “Marseillaise” which now Hays’s Louisianians were singing. All blended into something piteous, something old and touching, and of a dim nobility. The pickets out in the deep night listened.
“Just as I am, without one plea
Save that thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bid’st me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come!”
A soldier, standing picket and hearing the singing behind a dusky wave of earth, had his doubts. “If we really come to him—if the Yankees over there really came to him—if we both came, why,—there wouldn’t be any battle to-morrow.... Seeing that he said, ‘Love your enemy’—which if everybody did presently there’d be no enemy—no more than an icicle in the sun.” He sighed and shifted his musket. “They think they mean what they’re singing, but they don’t—”