23rd.—No movement. Should this journal, after I am gone, fall into the hands of persons, who shall undertake to read it, and shall complain that these everlasting records of “no movement,” “all quiet,” and “thunder storms,” are dry food for the mind, I answer them now : That the hardships which we suffer in this world, instead of awakening a sympathy for others in the same condition, are more apt to call up unworthy comparisons, with a remark, that “they need not complain; they are no worse off than we are.” And just so at this moment, I find the physical man of the army answering the complaints of mental man in civil life, finding fault with the dullness of these records. Try, says he, long camping and disappointed expectations, amid the swamps of the Chickahominy, living on half rations of hard crackers and salt beef, and you will then be able to appreciate the hardships of dry food, and the difficulty of assimulating from it moist ideas.
But, at 5 P. M.,—an event. Our Balloon is up, with Professer Lowe and General McClellan, taking observations of the enemy and his movements. Boom—speaks a big gun from away beyond the Chickahominy. Bang—a little cloud of smoke just over the balloon, and the fragments of a shell hiss and screech in all directions around it! Ah, General, are yon thinking. Eight hundred feet above the earth, how quickly that shell, or the one this moment coming in search of you, by a passing touch with the gossamar web which holds you suspended above your fellow men, would extinguish all the hopes and bright visions of political or military glory, which sometimes form the brightest jewel in the crown of patriotism? Or are you reflecting on the solicitude with which you are now watched by the tens of thousands of humble but anxious men, praying, without one selfish feeling, to the God of the patriot, to protect and preserve you, on whom they feel now rests the solution of the greatest problem, in the moral as well as the political history of the world? I wish I knew your thoughts just now. I wish I could know that they are as far above the grovelling, selfish ambition of some of those now watching you, as you this moment swing higher than they.
And now, oh General! look down, I beseech you, from your airy height, on your little army below, and devise means to preserve it from the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. Particularly guard from those evils, your officers; and most particularly your journeyman Generals. Teach them that it requires more than accidental promotion, or even accidental success without merit, to make great men of little ones. Teach them, I beseech you, the folly of vanity; whilst you inculcate the fact that many of your officers are doubly blessed with permission to carry all their brains in their shoulder straps, leaving their heads unincumbered, and to be used for substantial purposes.
Teach your men to be not only obedient and respectful, but submissive to the whims of then- superiors; that they have no right to any of the comforts to be gathered by the wayside; that should they find the fishes, the fruits, the poultry and other delicacies of the country guarded against their approach, for the comfort of their Generals, to remember that these Generals were never confined to hard bread and dried beef, on long marches, and can therefore never appreciate the wants and the sufferings of the common soldiers, who are; and that their might gives right to appropriate all these to themselves. Teach them that when, at the close of a hard day’s march, through mud and rain, should a “double quick” be required of them, their commander, being well mounted, can know nothing of the impossibility of obedience, and that terribly profane oaths are at such times the only gentlemanly invigorators known to Generals. Teach them that obedience from submission, and not from principle or affection, is the only rule to be recognized in your army; that in becoming soldiers they ceased to be men; and all for thy glory and thine honor.
