Читать книгу A Minor War History Compiled from a Soldier Boy's Letters to "the Girl I Left Behind Me": 1861-1864 онлайн

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I got a letter from Roger Woodbury Wednesday. He is camped on Long Island and is enjoying camp life immensely. The Division he is in will consist of ten New England regiments, and is probably designed to operate somewhere along the coast when the time comes for the grand move.

We are building a line of forts to encircle Washington on the north. Details from this brigade have worked upon two near our camp. One of these now has twenty guns mounted, commanding the country for miles around. How soon we will move, we cannot tell—perhaps in a day, perhaps not for a month. We have two days’ rations constantly in readiness. The Massachusetts First has gone over into the country somewhere for a few days.

I ran into a little bunch of excitement this noon. Had gone over to a huckster’s on the road running between the camps of the Pennsylvania Twenty-sixth and Massachusetts Eleventh, to buy a pie for dinner. Saw a commotion over in the Eleventh camp which seemed worth looking into, so I went over. Had just passed the camp guard when I saw one of the boys rushing a negro out of the crush and over to the Pennsylvania camp. The negro was almost paralyzed with fright. He was a runaway, and had been with the Massachusetts boys quite a little time. His master got track of him and sent two slave catchers to get him. But when they tried to execute their mission, some of the boys promptly knocked them down and got the negro out of the way.