As I got back, carrying my big piece of meat, in my hands, Col. H. C. Cabell, commanding our Battalion, met me. He said, “My dear boy, where on earth did you get that meat?” I told him. “Well,” he said, “I am almost starved; could you give me a little piece?” I cut off a chunk as big as my fist, stuck it on a sharp stick, held it a few minutes in a fire, close by, and handed it up to the Colonel, sitting on his horse. He took it off the stick, and ate it ravenously. He said it was the best morsel he ever tasted! It was scant times when a Colonel of artillery was as famished as he was! I cut up the rest of the beef, and divided among several of us, and we cooked it on a stick, the only cooking utensil we had at hand, and ate it, with a keenness of enjoyment that terrapin, canvass back duck, and Lynnhaven oysters could not provoke me to now. My dear! but that hot meat was good, to palates accustomed, mostly, to nothing, and no salt on that, for about a week. The only meat we had now,—when we had any at all.—was fat mess pork, and we ate that raw. Hot beef was a delicious change!
Meanwhile the hours had worn on. We limbered up the guns, and moved several miles off, toward the right, passing through Spottsylvania Court House. It was here we went by to see Cary Eggleston for the last time. He died next day.
We halted in a broom-sedge field, some distance beyond the Court House, and parked our guns, along with some other artillery, already there. And here we stayed a day or two.
The only thing I particularly recall of the stay here, was a trivial circumstance. One of the batteries we found in this field, belonged to the “Reserve Artillery” of which the “unreserved artillery” had a very humble opinion indeed,—just at that time.
These fellows had not fired a shot, through all the late fighting, and their guns were as bright, and clean as possible; which ours were not. One day a blue bird started to build her nest in the muzzle of one of their guns. Some of the sentimental fellows took this as an augury. “A sweet gentle little bird building her nest in the muzzle of a cannon! What could that mean but, that peace was about to be made, and these cannon useless?”
The rest of us scouted this fancy, and took it as a rare good joke on that “Reserve Artillery.” We said “their guns were not of any use anyhow except for birds’ nests; the birds knew they would be perfectly safe to build their nest, and live in those guns. They would not be disturbed!” We “chaffed” the officers and men of that battery most unmercifully. The whole field was on the grin, about that birds’ nest. The poor fellows were blazing mad, and much mortified; so disgusted that they took their nice, clean guns, and went off to a distant part of the field, to get rid of us. We were sorry to lose them! They afforded us a great deal of fun, if they didn’t have any themselves. That blue bird story got all over our part of the Army, and those “Reserve Artillerists” were “sorry that they were living.”