Sunday, July 31st.
At midnight I received an order from Col. Wainwright, Chief of Artillery of the Fifth Corps, directing me to get my battery out of “Fort Hell” as quickly as possible, and teams for the purpose arriving at about 3 o’clock A. M., we had the guns out and at the foot of the covered way by daylight, and I accompanied them to Siege Train Landing and turned them over to the proper officer, my two companies in the meantime reporting to the regimental camp without the loss of a man. Why the battery was ordered out so suddenly I do not know, unless it was because of a rumor that the enemy was mining our fort, and the facts that in our magazine we could occasionally hear muffled sounds apparently coming from the earth beneath, and that quite a number of men were seen from time to time to enter and leave the cellar of an old house between the lines which had been burned, furnished some confirmation of the rumor, for we knew that work of that sort was going on at other points.
