ng. The
siege guns were withdrawn and shipped, as were the heavier camp equipage
and extra baggage. Aug. 16th about noon we broke camp and moved out, we
did not know where to, nor where for. It proved to be a march down the
peninsula. The first day out we made but about four miles, and halted
near a corn field. The corn was fit for roasting and the men had a
feast. I suppose the strict rules of McClellan's army, probably, were
violated as there was some foraging done.

August 17th we made twelve miles, and passed Charles City Court House.
Inexcusable vandalism was here committed. The books and records of the
county seat were scattered about in profusion. Many documents two
hundred years old were passed about, and there were those with
Washington's signature. We crossed the Chickahomony, I was told, near
its junction with the James, on a pontoon bridge, I should think
one-eighth of a mile in length. It was the longest stretch of bridge of
the kind I ever saw.

The road we took on this march was not the one by which we went up, on
our way to the Richmond we did not see until about three years after.
The country does not vary much from prairie level. The soil is light,
with no stone in it to speak of. In a dry time, with considerable travel
it powders up so that in going through it the dust rises in almost solid
columns. A good part of the Potomac army, horse, artillery, foot and
baggage trains, had preceded us. This made the dust as deep as it could
be. Much of the road was through forests. I well remember this march
from the dust experience. It exceeded anything I ever heard of. We would
march for long distances when a man could not see his file leader--the
dust so filled the air as to prevent seeing. Of course, the men had to
breath this air. The nostrils would become plugged with the dust so
moistened as to make slugs. Every now and then the men would fire them
out of their noses almost as forcibly as a boy snaps a marble from his
fingers. I remember having serious forbodings that taking in such
quantities of road dirt would cause lasting injury. I do not know that
my apprehensions of evil from this cause were ever realized. I suppose
the dust that got into the lungs worked out in some way.

Aug. 19th we passed through Williamsburg, the site of William's and
Mary's College and the capital of the colony in the days when Patrick
Henry told the House of Delegates that, "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles
the First his Crom