30th.—It is now between two and three months since our regiment went into camp. We have had nearly three hundred cases of measles, with about as many of diarrhœa, dysentery and fever. Not one quarter of the regiment but has been sick in some way, and yet last night every man who left home with the regiment slept in camp—not one death by sickness or accident, none left behind, not one lost by desertion ! May we not challenge the armies of the world for a parallel? We are sleeping on our arms every night, in anticipation of an attack on Washington, and it seems to be the general belief that we shall be attacked here. I am no military man, and my opinion here is of no account to the world, but to me, for whose especial benefit it is written, it is worth as much as would be the opinion of a Napoleon. That opinion is, that we shall have no fight here—that the enemy is out-generaling us by feints to induce us to concentrate our forces here, whilst he makes a strike and overpowers us elsewhere.
