That was the sheep’s liver telling. Our theory was that all of those fellows had sheep’s livers, and that accounted for the insatiable “hankering after grass.”
I told this story in an after-dinner speech at a banquet some time ago to a company of twenty-nine female doctors of medicine—trained, and practicing physicians. They made no protest; listened with unbroken gravity; accepted it as a narrative of actual occurrence, and looked at me with wide-eyed interest. When I finished I thought it best to tell them that it was all a joke. Then they laughed themselves into a fit.
Well, this little account of our doings, and our life in the winter camp at Morton’s Ford—1863-1864—is done. Out of its duties, and companionships; its pleasures, and its deeper experiences, we Howitzers were laying up pleasant memories of the camp for the years to come. And often in after years, when some of us comrades got together we would speak of the old camp at Morton’s Ford.
The spring was now coming on. We knew that our stay here could not last much longer. How, and when, and where we should go from here, we did not know. We knew we would go somewhere—that was all. “We would know when the time came, and ‘Marse Robert’ wanted us” he would tell us.
That is the soldier’s life—“Go, and he goeth; come, and he cometh; do this, and he doeth it.” No choice. Wait for orders—then, quick! Go to it!
Well we were perfectly willing to trust “Marse Robert” and perfectly ready to do just what he said. Meantime we take no anxious thought for the morrow; we go on with our work, and our play—we are “prepared to move at a moment’s warning.”