Our losses by the rebels before Yorktown were not great, but the ravages by disease were fearful. Many thousands of noble fellows who would gladly have braved the dangers of the battle-field, were carried to the rear with fevers engendered by the deadly malaria of the swamps, from which few ever recovered sufficiently to rejoin the ranks; and thousands of others were laid in humble graves along the marshy borders of the Warwick or about the hospitals at Young's Mills. For a month the men were almost continually under arms; often called in the middle of the night to resist the attempts of the enemy to force our line under cover of the thick darkness, standing in line of battle day after day and digging at earthworks night after night. During the thirty days of the siege we had twenty days of rain. Thunder storms followed each other in quick succession, with lightnings more vivid than we had ever seen at the north. Men lay down to rest at night with their equipments buckled about them and wet to their skins. Men unaccustomed to the hardships of campaigning could not endure such exposure. A few divisions of the army performed by far the greater part of the labor, either because they had at first reached positions which imposed greater toil, or because greater confidence was reposed in them. Our own division was one of those upon which the duties imposed were too great for men to perform; yet the men would have resented being sent to the rear, and it was said that General Smith remarked that "he had spoken for a front seat for his boys and he intended to keep it." Added to all the exposures and hardships of the siege, there was a deplorable want of proper commissary and medical supplies. While the men were supplied with fair rations of hard bread, vegetables were unknown among us, and the supply of fresh meat wholly inadequate. In the Medical Department the greatest difficulty was experienced in obtaining supplies, and indeed it was impossible to get them. Not that regimental surgeons did not use their utmost endeavor to procure them, but as brigade and regimental commissaries could not obtain supplies of food which were not furnished to the army at all, so surgeons could not procure medicines and other necessaries which were locked in the storehouses in Washington. This subject will be more fully alluded to in another place, and it is to be hoped that the responsibility of this criminal negligence to supply the army with medical and hospital stores may fall where it belongs. Thus, with their minds wrought up to a continual state of excitement, with constant exposure to tempests and malaria, with excessive and exhausting labors, and with improper food and scarcity of medicine, sickness and death swept over us like a pestilence.