20th.—These men, who were yesterday worn out and abused, who needed all the rest they could get, were ordered up this morning at half-past 2, to march at 4, and then, after being formed into line, were kept waiting till 6. The Surgeons dare not say, “General, permit me to suggest that this is rapidly exhausting the nervous energies of the men, and that last night, we had to leave over sixty, overcome by the fatigue of the day.” It would have been deemed insolent and insubordinate in a Surgeon to have suggested that the two hours which the soldiers spent on their feet, waiting for their officers to get ready, might have been spent with great benefit to their health and energies, in bed, and the Surgeons must be dumb and the men sick.
We are to-day passing over some of the places of our former defeats—Big and Little Bethel, and the localities of some of our unsuccessful skirmishes.
