February 24 — This morning we renewed our march. The weather was calm, warm, and bright, with not a speck of cloud staining the sky, but we had not proceeded very far on our way before dark and threatening thunder clouds came rolling from the west, and soon broke over us in a drenching rain storm, with thunder and lightning in a regular midsummer style. But as our movement was not urgently important, the benignant humanity of our captain allowed us to stop, until the storm passed over and the rain ceased, and shelter ourselves in an old deserted house on the roadside.
We reached the Winchester and Pughtown road before night and quartered in a vacant house on the Pughtown road about six miles from Winchester, and near a little winding stream wearing the euphonious appellation of Hog Creek. The weather is beginning to grow warm, mild, and sunny. The boys are in good spirits and lively, and seem to be utterly unmindful of the hardships and dangers, deadly encounters and bloody conflicts, that are the attending concomitants of an active and vigorous campaign, which from all ominous appearances is ripe and nearly ready to open, for the breezes that sweep from the north already bear on their bosom the sounding echoes of the approaching footsteps and measured tread of a formidable and determined invading foe. Soon, ah, too soon, the demons of war will be brandishing their glittering blades and fiendishly slashing for human blood, and the dead and dying be scattered over the fields that are now ready to don the blooming livery of spring.
But hie away, ye gloomy reveries, distracting thoughts, and perplexing fears, and let the soothing touch of hope revive my drooping spirits. The war cloud may burst with all its fury and the red fiery eye of battle may glow in all its fiercest wrath, yet I may withstand all its destructive ravages, pass through all its fiery ordeals unscathed and untouched, and live to see the last fragment of war cloud drift away and dissolve in the radiant glow of freedom’s peaceful light.
