Soldiers of the Eighty-Fourth Regiment Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers:
If the feeling with which these words of salutation are heard and accepted, is like unto the feeling that prompts their utterance, then are we fully compensated in our coming together.
We name the old Regiment, and what recollections crowd in upon us; memories of the camp, the march, and the field. Some fond—many weighted with the touch of sorrow felt in its heavy burden even until now, through all of so much of time.
In the presence of these recollections I could not hope to control your thought. I would not ask you simply to follow words as I speak them, but rather that you be all of memory, all of feeling, thinking, listening the while if you can, but surely thinking. For in thought you can cover more ground in moments than I could travel for you in days.
Together you comprise the Whole Book, the turning of whose pages wakens memory to every detail, while from the one individual you can have no more than the head-lines to the volume whose contents you are so familiar with.
Together you know what our Regiment was; alone I can but outline to you, and that roughly, a meagre part of the full story of the 84th.
Its history could be found only in the everything that could be told by each of all the hundreds, living and dead, who numbered its total strength. But where your special individual interest lies it is not possible for me to tread. I wish I could tell the story of every Company, relate the incidents of every mess, and note the experiences of every individual.