United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding. --Henry V.
To really enjoy life in a Camp of Instruction requires a peculiar
cast of mind. It requires a genuine liking for a tread-mill round
of merely mechanical duties; it requiers a taste for rising in the
chill and cheerless dawn, at the unwelcome summons of “reveille,”
to a long day filled with a tiresome routine of laborious drills
alternating with tedious roll-calls, and wearisome parades and
inspections; it requires pleased contentment with walks continually
cut short by the camp-guard, and with amusements limited to rough
horse-play on the parade-ground, and dull games of cards by sputtering
candles in the tent.
As these be tastes and preferences notably absent from the mind of
the average young man, our volunteers usually regard their experience
in Camp of Instruction as among the most unpleasant of their war
memories.
These were the trials that tested Harry Glen's resolution sorely.
When he enlisted with the intention of redeeming himself, he
naturally expected that the opportunity he desired would be given
by a prompt march to the field, and a speedy entrance into an
engagement. He nerved himself strenuously for the dredful ordeal of
battle, but this became a continually receding point. The bitter
defeat at Bull Run was bearing fruit in months of painstaking
preparation before venturing upon another collision.
Day by day he saw the chance of retrieving his reputation
apparently more remote. Meanwhile discouragements and annoyances
grew continually more plentiful and irksome. He painfully learned
that the most disagreeable part of war is not the trial of battle,
but the daily sacrifices of personal liberty, tastes, feelings and
conveniences involved in camp-life, and in the reduction of one's
cherished individuality to the dead-level of a passive, obedient,
will-less private soldier.
“I do wish the regiment would get orders to move!” said almost hourly
each one of a half-million impatient youths fretting in Camps of
Instruction through the long Summer of 1861.
“I do wish the regiment would get orders to move!” said Harry Glen
angrily one evening, on coming into the Surgeon's tent to have his
blistered hands dressed. he had been on fatigue duty during the
day, and the Fatigue-Squad had had an obstinate struggle with an
old oak stump, which disfigured the parade-ground, and resisted
removal like an Irish tenant.
“I am willing--yes, I can say I am anxious, even--to go into battle,”
he continued, while Dr. Paul Denslow laid plasters of simple cerate
on the abraded palms, and then swathed them in bandages. “Anything
is preferable to this chopping tough stumps with a dull ax, and
drilling six hours a day while the thermometer hangs around the
nineties.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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