September 6 — In this camp we are spending some of our happiest soldier days. The weather is pleasant and the foraging is superfine; the cornfields are in first-class order and are giving the richest kind of milk just now.
Every few nights our singing club goes to some farmhouse or village cottage, to while away the gliding hours with mirth and song in mutual, voluntary, and pleasant exchange for milk and pie. Truly war can ever furnish a checkered pathway for mortal man to tread, its vicissitudinous winding course inevitably lying through the exciting scenes of the battle-field, where its bloody track is oft times thickly strewn with the dead and dying, and where many a stalwart castle of hope lies stilled in death, buried in the ruins and wreck of the fray. Then again, if fortune smiles and the storm of battle is successfully weathered, the pathway of duty often still leads to distant fields where space has to be annihilated by forced and weary marches, that may end in a successful raid or a ruinous rout. And when the spasmodic waves of war have rolled too wildly and high, and dashed themselves into harmless spray so that they have to sink back to the sleeping billow to gain and gather new strength, then the dull and heavy routine of camp life drags and creeps slowly by and the watch fires of contentment and happiness often burn low. But, with all the discomforts, privations, ennui, and onerous sameness of camp life, the fatiguing march, and the dismal horrors of the battle-field, the cloud of discouragement and despondency can never dip so low as to blot out every ray of cheering pleasure that now and then rifts the war cloud and peeps through the blackness and smiles and glows and shines with charming splendor, even between the wrinkles on war’s grim front; for to-day we are sojourning in pleasure’s cheering light, and to-morrow we may be on the way to the field of war’s dread alarms.
Last night we were out on a serenade, and as the sentimental words,
..
“When in thy dreaming,
Moons like these shall shine again,
And daylight beaming,
Prove thy dreams are vain,
Wilt thou not relenting,
For thy absent lover sigh,
In thy heart consenting,
To a prayer gone by,”
..
floated away on the wings of song through the shimmering moonlight, the soft stilly breathing of their inspiration evoluted a chorus of milk and pie garnished with the smiles and charms of pretty, youthful maidens. Pleasurable amenities like these, fitted in with the duties of the field, make sunny spots that sparkle and glow in the mosaic patchwork that is spread along the soldier’s ever-changing pathway, and their sweet light will tinge with roseate hue the distant skies that bend over the gateway of the future.
