If a spectacular, dramatic representation of the Third Regiment in Camp Alger could be put upon the stage it would be more than the success of the season. I suggest this as an opportunity for any Missourian whose aspirations tend toward the dramatic in literature. The writer would have only to be a faithful copyist with enough of the artist's sense and imaginative faculty to select the characteristic and telling features, and present them on a thread of romance. Let me just go about with him a day and show him what he could work into a fine spectacular performance.
First, the general scene shall be a vast wilderness of pines, cedars, oaks and chestnuts, and other forest trees, with a tangled undergrowth of vines, ferns, mosses, blackberry bushes, shrub honeysuckle, laurel and other flowering plants; narrow, sandy roads, worn deep into the red soil by a century of travel, wind through this wilderness; and here and there as they lead, in their windings, over hill and vale, through deep shades, crossing now and then a clear, rippling stream to which thrushes sing and where mosses and ferns cluster thickly to the water's edge, there should appear in the great forest a little open field, whose yellow soil lies broken into furrows only in strips, indicating to what extent farming had been carried when the government laid hold upon the vast old estate for an army camp.
The Third Regiment shall be placed at the western edge of a small field that opens in the midst of a wilderness and slopes gently southward and eastward toward spring-fed streams that are hidden by shrubbery and fringed by many ferns. The time shall be a day in June, and the action shall open with the rising of the sun. From the higher ground, where the staff officers' tents are situated at the extreme west side under the towering oaks and pines, we shall watch the sun appear above the wooded hill to the east and drive away the white mist in the vale below, while the wild birds, the robins and thrushes, are greeting the dawn with happy lays. The mess fires beyond the tents are started, and in the still air of morning their columns of smoke rise and outspread tall and graceful.
Hark! The bugle sounds the first call. How it thrills the very soul and makes you feel all the grand opportunity of the new day, awakening the old hope never dead, and kindling enthusiasm for life's enterprises ever new! Who would not waken to hear it, however sweet his morning slumbers might be to him? waken to hear, though he should turn over upon his canvas cot and float away into dreamland again with the inspiring notes still echoing through his soul. But if he lies awake he will hear from one quarter "Dixie," it may be, played by the band of some other regiment; shortly afterward, "The Star-Spangled Banner" by another, and then the drum corps of our New York neighbors will make sleep utterly impossible. Then follows our full bugle corps, with revéille proper:
I can't get 'em up, I can't get 'em up,
I can't get 'em up this morning;
I can't get 'em up, I can't get 'em up,
I can't get 'em up at all.
The corporal's worse than the private,
The sergeant's worse than the corporal,