Friday, February 8, 2013

After the funeral, I felt much prostrated; but it was best to keep employed. Robert and I kept our familiar quarters, where at night we could be warm and dry: an important matter now; for at evening it grows very cold, and much rain falls. Water was convenient, too, for the washing which it was necessary to do; and I could pack at leisure the things I wished to send North. In a few days, all this was done. I took my farewell of the apartment where Ed. died, now stripped to its bare walls; and, not being quite in condition to go into the woods to camp, I accepted the doctor’s invitation, and spent a day or two last week in his private room. In one corner lay the stretchers, ready for the wounded men; in another, a patient sick of fever. By night, I could hear the shouts of the delirious patients from the corridors.

I saw three bodies lying together on the roof of the veranda of the building, overlooking the street. A little breath of air came; and the covering was turned down from the face of one, a member of our company,— his, and yet not his, — a fine fellow, a favorite of Ed.’s, at whose feet he now sleeps. One of the others belonged to us too, — a boy I knew well. He will never see again his pretty cottage-home under the trees by the Connecticut. The chaplain was sick the day of the funeral: so I conducted the service for these two at one time, after dark, under the moon. We were forced to bury them hurriedly, for it was late; and I fear with less of a feeling of solemnity than we once had at such occasions. I believe it is true, that the edge of sensibility grows dull through use, even in the case of these sad experiences. Funerals have been so frequent of late, sometimes three or four a day, that they lose their impressiveness in part.

Pray Heaven the sickness is spending itself! There are signs that it is so. It has raged, for the most part, among the youths under twenty, whose immature fibre appears to afford more congenial harbor for the pestilence than the frames of the older men. Almost all the deaths have been among the boys. The death-list is really not as large as is often the case in camps. We do not suffer as some Maine regiments are suffering close by us; but it is large enough to cast a shadow, and make us all feel the insecurity of life.

My record has been almost entirely of deaths and hospitals the last few weeks; but now let me turn from these things. We are, after all, not a gloomy set; though skies are so dull, and health so uncertain. The spirits of the men are often high, and there is much fun going forward. A great character in the camp is one Tibbs, a fellow with many crotchets in his brain, —too many for it to remain in a normal, healthy state, — and who really, perhaps, ought hardly to have been passed at the medical examination; but he is a fellow of infinite jest, and his pranks and sayings keep up the spirits of the regiment. He has wit; and when that fails, in his blunt talk, he blunders often into capital hits, hitting right and left, sparing no one, from the colonel down. The other day, a large hollow tree had been cut down, and a group of officers stood looking at the hollow. Tibbs came up beside them, and peered with his queer whiskered face into the hole. “That’s a big hollow, Tibbs,” said one of the group of officers. “Well, yes,” said Tibbs; “and next time we have the long roll, if ‘taint full of officers, I guess I’ll come here and hide.” By all odds, the most amusing thing I have seen since I became a soldier was Tibbs’s parody of Col. Birge, of the Thirteenth Connecticut, a veteran regiment, which often went through its admirable drill close by our camp, and whose commander at such times threw himself with unusual energy into his work. I heard great laughter and shouting on the parade-ground one morning, and, looking out, saw Tibbs mounted on a very lean and long-eared jackass, which he would cudgel until the animal gave up his obstinacy and went off at an ungainly gallop. Tibbs was excited by the motion, and roared his orders in all parts of the field. Now it was, “Close column by division, on second division, right in front!” Then whack would go the stick, and Tibbs, eager as if in battle, would gallop off to the other side of the field. “Head of column, to the left! ” “Deploy column on first company! ” &c., &c. It was an admirable caricature of the efficiency of Col. Birge, who was always at full gallop, keeping his regiment on the double-quick. Tibbs drilled his imaginary command for some time; when some one, perhaps a sergeant, shocked at the indecorum, started after him at full speed. But Tibbs’s time had not yet come. As the pursuer approached, Tibbs’s ungainly steed reared and brayed; and, while dodging his heels, the pursuer measured his length in the mud, leaving Tibbs the cavalier, in his shabby uniform, to go on caracoling, and shouting his orders.