March 14. — On my side, in a corn-field, about thirteen miles from Baton Rouge, on the Port-Hudson road, with Port Hudson from five to seven miles away. Off for war at last, as sure as we live. It is the noon halt. Grover’s division, far as I can see, lies in lines, one line behind another, in each about one regiment; arms all stacked, with the men behind; some sleeping, some eating, some inspecting feet becoming blistered. Last evening, we left our old camp in good earnest. We marched out half a mile to the camp of the Ninety-first New York, with which we are brigaded; then waited for the army to assemble; from street and path a stream of troops, coming like runnels into a larger stream; until at last Gen. Grover himself, with the red flag and white star of the fourth division, went to the head of the column. A furlong or so in front of us, young Col. van Zandt, our brigadier, took his station with the blue white and blue ensign of the second brigade. We are all in heavy order, each one of us δπλίτης; though, since the review of yesterday, essential things have undergone a wonderful diminution; an effective-looking crowd, though not exactly smooth and neat. We are soon on the point of starting. Our colonel comes riding back from the general, with the resolute, pleasant smile he usually wears, a little more expanded than common. The colonel whispers to Capt. Morton; whereat the captain catches the smile, and he comes back toward his company,— the color-company, you know. “Gen. Grover says the Fifty-second is the best .nine months’ regiment in the service.” A little butter of that sort will help hard fare and tough marching; that the general knows.
Ahead ride the cavalry, yellow trimmings about their collars, yellow welts about the seams of their jackets at the back, and stripes down the pantaloons. Artillery come up. Their trimmings are red; in fine order everybody; horses prancing, cannon polished, muskets in the finest order; an untried army, but of the finest material, and as well equipped, I suppose, as any country through all history has ever equipped her warriors. The march begins, out past the spots where we have stood on picket. I see that the fence-post, against which I leaned all one night, has gone to the coals. We come to two roads branching off from the one on which we are marching: one to Clinton, twenty-five or thirty miles away; the other to Port Hudson. This last road we take. Soon we are beyond the outmost picket-stations, and push forth into unknown regions.
The weather is grand. We are in a heavy magnolia forest: the sun’s rays, now nearly level (for it is late in the afternoon), cannot reach us. We go mile after mile. The road is just what it should be, not muddy, not dry enough to be dusty; but smooth and soft enough for the foot to feel it like a cushion, yet not so soft as to take the foot in too deep. It is just wide enough for the regiment to march comfortably by the flank, in sections four deep. Sometimes we go over a hill: then, far ahead and far behind, I can see the big column of infantry, a huge caterpillar eating its way through the woods, jointed along his back where the sections are separated, spiny as a caterpillar’s back is, with the hundreds of muskets sticking out at various angles. The night settles down, a night of stars; and from the westward, as the glow fades, rockets go darting up, signals from the fleet, out of sight, in the river, ascending like us, loaded with death against the great fortress. Shall we march all night? No one knows, not captain or colonel, only Gen. Grover apparently; but at eight o’clock, or about that, eight miles on our journey, comes the order to bivouac. A pause in the march, then a quarter of an hour of intermittent progress, then horsemen dimly seen in the starlight; the order to “file right,” and I follow the tall color-sergeant over the rails of a destroyed fence into a ridgy corn-field, across which the regiment advances in line, guiding on the centre as well as it can see, then halts; the Ninety-first thirty or forty paces in front, the Twenty-fourth Connecticut about the same distance behind. Stack arms, then camp for the night.
I go back from my place on the left of Co. A to Co. D, and shout through the dark for Bivins. We find a soft place among the furrows: two rubber blankets over a soft ridge make our mattress; then two woollen blankets over; and last the shelter-tents, not pitched, but on top by way of counterpane, to give a finish to the bed. Lie down now, boys, loaded pistol still at the belt, every arm where it can be caught in an instant; for Port Hudson may send out fellows to stir us up during the night. “Corporal Buffum, under the stump there, is your bedroom well aired?” Buffum thinks he shall make out not to suffocate. The night-wind blows over us, the stars shine as only Southern stars do, and in a few minutes fancy runs northward and homeward through a thousand dreams.
The morning comes at last. Is it D or B? The mind gradually gathers itself. Is it the camp by the river, or under the magnolias? Ah! now I have it, — the tall naked trees, the furrows bristling with dry stalks and partially covered with short grass, the army rising like a brimming colony of ants from the ground. Now, as I roll over, my pistol hits me in the ribs, and slap against my legs hits the heavily-weighted cartridge-box. It will make my thigh black and blue, I believe. I have slept as well as I ever did. No one knows exactly when we shall be ordered into line.
At any rate, the canteens must be filled: that is the first thing. Bivins and I draw cuts, and it falls to me: so Cyrus Stowell and I start off, hung round with a maze of white canteen-strings, as if somebody had thrown a net over us. We got back to camp just as the cry “to fall in” is being shouted by the first sergeants. The brigade files out of the corn-field, and is on the road again.
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and there is no new thing under the sun.” I think of that as two companies from the regiment are detailed as flankers. They go off into the woods, fifteen or twenty rods from the road on each side; and throughout the march we see these two lines guarding the main body against ambuscade, — through stumps and stalks, through old sugar-fields, plantation barn-yards, and wild swamps. I remember to have read, that just so Lord Percy, on the retreat from Concord, threw out flankers to protect his harassed party. Probably the children in the houses we are passing, fifty years from now, will tell how Banks went by to Port Hudson, as the old people along the Lexington road recall their great reminiscence.
When I was studying-up the old Assyrians once, I found out that the soldiers of Sennacherib were prepared against the Jewish horsemen with almost the same tactics which the French were to employ against the Mameluke cavalry, ages after, in the same region. So Lord Clyde, in India, once circumvented an army of mutinous Sepoys with the same strategy, particular for particular, which the old Hebrew leader Joshua used against “the men of Ai,” in the days when the sun and moon stood still. I dare say, in spite of improvements, we look very much like these old soldiers of the past, as the features of our warfare are similar. In clothing and equipments, we are reduced to what is simply convenient and easy. The pattern of our garments and their quantity, the fashion of weapons and trappings, — every thing is fitted for convenient use. What is convenient now, was, no doubt, convenient a thousand years ago. Probably, after all, we do not look much unlike the spearmen of Nineveh, the legionaries of Rome, or the halberdiers of Alva, when they put off holiday things, and undertook the active work of war.
The morning deepens toward noon. Fewer soldiers now leave the line to forage among hen-roosts; and the plunder, collected in the cool of the morning, is thrown away as the sun begins to burn. Only the negroes, a half-dozen or so of whom go with each company, stick to their prizes of chickens and turkeys. The Fifty-second grow red, and sweat; and now, along the roadside, we begin to see — what, I believe, is always seen when an army is on the march — knapsacks, sometimes full and sometimes empty, blankets, shelter-tents, all the articles of a soldier’s kit, thrown away for relief. Occasionally we stop, when the stream of men rushes from the roadway to the grass at the side, and in a moment every man is flat on his back. It is a good way to rest, though a dirty one: the pack behind supports you at a comfortable incline. Sometimes you sit in the dust, sometimes in the dew: one is not over particular when each pore spouts hot perspiration like a perfect geyser. In one of these pauses, we hear cheering far behind us, that comes rolling nearer; when word passes from mouth to mouth, “The general, the general!” In a moment, a clatter of hoofs, and then past us sweeps the “iron leader,” at full gallop and bareheaded, with his staff behind him, on his way to the front of the column.
Men now begin to fall out. They lie panting by the roadside, in fence-corners, under bushes, with heads resting against logs — a sorrowful sight, though not so bad as if we were on a retreat, and a howling enemy were to pick them up instead of friendly baggage-wagons in the rear. Sometimes there is a momentary hitch as the column picks its way around a mud-hole. I find some relief then for my shoulders in stooping over, and hitching the weight of the pack on to my back. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul; but poor Paul has so much the hardest time, that Peter ought to be willing to give him a lift.
Fortunately, the day is very fine; a grand breeze comes blowing up behind us: it is sunny, but cool; and the vines from the roadside wave white roses at us as we go by, as if the hedges were in for the North, however it might be with the people who lived behind them. Thank fortune! so far as my body goes, it is a good one. Heavy, muscular fellows are pitching away their knapsacks, or lying swollen and panting by the roadside: but, in my case, there is no headache yet; heart works smoothly and healthily in the left side, and liver under the diaphragm; legs swing to and fro without a painful chord, and feet are fully up to their responsibilities.
True, it is hard. “Whenever the column halts, I am flat on my back, and in the dirt at once. If there is a pool near, I must dowse my hot head, and re-wet the handkerchief in my cap; but so it is with us all. It is a good thing, when all favors, to be big and imposing, like Corporal Green here, and the rest of our fine, grenadier-looking soldiers; but, for actual work, the little, light-weighted fellows are even with them.
We have come now some six or seven miles. The forenoon draws to its close: true as the needle to the pole, the belly turns dinnerward. The fence is down, here to the left; and the long column, filing into just such an old cornfield as we camped in the night before, rules it across with long, blue lines of soldiery at regular intervals, and proceeds to write it over with such confusion as some thousands of reckless, hungry men would be likely to make. Here it is, that, a dried herring or two and some hard-tack and cheese being promptly put away, the color-corporal, under the lee of the stacked arms of the guard, pitches off his traps, lies down under the folded colors, and writes.
