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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It looks very much as though we were going into winter quarters here. Logs of suitable size and length are being hauled in, to be used as an underpinning for our canvas houses, and the boys, in squads of five or six, are already at work on their quarters. My crew is already made up, a picked squad of congenial souls, and we will get at our building operations next week.

We had a thunder shower night before last, and it has cleared off very cold. But there is an abundance of fuel, and half a dozen campfires agoing in each company street.

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Camp Second N. H. Regiment,

Chickamoxen, Md., Nov. 27, 1861.

FOR amateurs, the association of house builders I joined has done a good job. It is on the same general plan as most of the others. First, you start in to build a log cabin. When the walls are four or five feet high, you stop, fasten your tent on top—and there you are. It is astonishing, the room you gain over a plain tent. On the right-hand corner fronting the street is a fireplace—a big one—built, with its chimney, of small logs laid cob-house fashion and thickly plastered with Maryland mud. The bottom is sunk a foot or more, and around the front is a one-log pen or barrier, which serves a double purpose. It is just right for a seat before the fire, and it keeps our thick carpet of straw out of mischief. When we are all fixed up we’ll have bunks and a table and shelves and pegs and a gun rack and everything required in a well-regulated family. I am writing by the light of a candle. Roberts [Orsino,] one of the tent’s crew, is warming himself at the fire and going over all the songs he has in stock, and the rest of the gang seem to have no higher ambition, just at present, than to “break up” both me and him.