6th.—This morning, during a rain, we moved our bivouac about a quarter of a mile, and encamped. To get settled, we have worked most of the day in the rain, and to-night I feel about as miserably as the most miserable wife on earth could wish a more miserable husband, and this, I presume, is as miserable a condition as a miserable nostalgia can well imagine.
Letters from home to-day, but they are from twelve to twenty days old. The comfort of a regular mail, the Government, with a very little well directed effort, might easily afford to the soldier, and it would be, even as a sanitary measure, a great stroke of economy. How many a poor fellow would be saved by regular cheering letters from home, from a depressing nostalgia, lapsing “rapidly into typhoid fever, and death. But it is folly to think of a reform in this, when the families of so many of our soldiers are in a state of destitution, simply because the pay due to them is withheld for five, six, and even, in some instances, for eight or nine months. One of my hospital nurses has just come to me, with tears on his face, showing me a letter from his wife, in which she says that her little home has been sold under the hammer, because she could not pay a debt of fifty dollars! and this when the government is in arrears to them over a hundred dollars. This seems unjust, and ought to be remedied.
