calling from his tent door: "Officer of the day, release the guards and send them into their quarters!" [Illustration: Gen. Charles T. Campbell] CHAPTER II. BY J. M. MARTIN. We Embark for the Peninsula--Yorktown--Camping in the Mud--Peach Orchard--Artillery Practice--Battle of Williamsburg. On the 17th of March the regiment embarked and steamed down the Potomac, past Mount Vernon, of hallowed memories, on its way to Fortress Monroe, whither the army was being transferred to enter upon the historic and ill-fated Peninsular campaign. Upon arrival it went into camp near the ancient, but then recently burned town of Hampton, crumbling brick walls and charred chimneys being the only remaining monuments to mark the site of the once pleasant village, the beginning, to us, of the scenes of the war's "rude desolations," while protruding from the placid waters of the bay were to be seen the masts of the "Cumberland," that but a few days before had gone down with flag flying before the onset of the ram "Merrimac," while over by the Ripraps peacefully floated low on the waters the little "Monitor" that David-like, had single-handed put to flight this Goliath of the rebellion, that had defied our navy; a veritable "tub on a plank." On the morning of April 4 the grand advance was begun. Across the narrow neck of land that divided the waters of the Chesapeake and James, the magnificent hosts of the Army of the Potomac, stretching from shore to shore, moved forward to the fortified post of the enemy at Yorktown. Battlefields, like history, repeat themselves. It is said the plains of Esdraelon have been the theater of a greater number of conflicts at arms than any other known portion of the globe, so here at Yorktown, where the Sons of Virginia, Pennsylvania and others of the thirteen colonies humbled the British under Cornwallis in 1781, and whose lines of entrenchments were yet visible, were again to meet in 1862, the sons of these sires of revolutionary fame, in martial combat, not shoulder to shoulder, as then, but in opposing phalanx. The line of advance of the 57th was by the main road leading from Hampton to Yorktown by way of Little and Big Bethel, the latter place being the scene of General B. F. Butler's unfortunate night venture of 1861.