August 12 — This morning at daylight we renewed our march and moved to Richmond, where we put our guns on the cars for shipment to Gordonsville; then we moved with our horses out on the Brook turnpike to Brook Church, some two or three miles northwest of Richmond, and camped.
The pike between Richmond and Petersburg almost touches the James River at Drewry’s Bluff. Our battery halted near the bluff to-day, and I went and looked at the heavy battery there, and its environments. Drewry’s Bluff, in the strict sense of the word, is no bluff, but only an abrupt dipping down, to the waters of the James, of an elevated and wooded plateau of a Chesterfield landscape. A little way from the top of the declivitous slope the battery is advantageously located by being countersunk into the face of the hill, giving the guns a sweeping command of the river below; of course the defense is no Gibraltar, by any means. The siege guns are of heavy caliber, and the whole battery has a first-class, sweeping range down the river. Right at the bluff the river makes a turn to the left,— the battery being on the right bank,— which gives the guns an excellent and perfect line range for several miles down the river. At the bluff the river is comparatively narrow, but widens out considerably into a broad and beautiful sheet of water just below the battery. Drewry’s Bluff is about nine miles below Richmond, in Chesterfield County. From what little I observed today it seems to me that the service of a heavy artilleryman at Drewry’s Bluff is much easier than the service of a horse artilleryman in the field. There the men are in good comfortable quarters month in and month out, year in and year out, with rations regular, while we are everlastingly marching and racing through sunshine and rain, sometimes day and night, pursuing or being pursued, over hill and dale, mountain and plain, like the fleet-winged wind and sometimes almost as empty, especially so when the rations burn low in the haversack.
