In a few days we were camped on a muddy field in Kentucky, quickly learning the duties of soldier-life, and familiarizing ourselves with the daily routine of an army in the field. My military career of four years' duration passed without any event of particular interest or importance; it was like that of two million other soldiers--to do their duty faithfully, whatever that duty might be--that was all. After eight months' service I was promoted to the rank of major in the regiment. At that time we were serving in middle Tennessee. Shortly afterward our regiment, with some three thousand men of the troops, made a forced march across the Cumberland mountains. In order to give the reader an idea of the hardships which the soldiers occasionally had to endure on a march, I shall give a short sketch of this. The detachment broke camp in Murfreesboro in the forenoon of a very hot day toward the close of May, and marched twenty miles before night, which was considered a good distance for the first day. Most of the men suffered from blistered feet, and they were all very tired. We prepared our supper, and had just gone to rest in a large open field and were beginning to fall asleep, when, at ten o'clock in the evening, the signal was given to fall in. In a few minutes the whole force was in line, and silently resumed the march forward. We marched the whole night, the whole of the next day, the following night, and till noon the day after, moving altogether a distance of over eighty miles, over a difficult and partly mountainous country, and stopping only one hour three times a day to cook our coffee and eat, while those who sank down by the roadside entirely exhausted were left until the rear-guard came and picked them up. When we finally arrived at our destination the enemy that we were pursuing had already decamped, and we had to return by the same route over which we had come, though more leisurely. Among the many victims of this march was a bright Norwegian lieutenant of my old company, Hans Johnson, who died shortly after our return to Murfreesboro. A few days afterward the regiment started on an expedition to the South. During this march I got sick with the fever, and would probably have died at Columbia, Tenn., if my friend Eustrom, who at that time was captain of Company D, had not succeeded in getting me into a rebel family, where I was treated with the greatest care, so that in a few days I was able to go by rail to Minnesota on a twenty days' leave of absence. This took place in the beginning of the month of July, 1862.