November of
'64! How it wore away alertness! The infantry-men--whom we used to
call "doughboys," for there was always a pretended feud between the
riders and the trudgers--often seemed going to sleep in the night in
their rain-filled holes far beyond the breastworks, each with its
little mound of earth thrown up toward the beleaguered town. Their
night-firing would slacken almost to cessation for many minutes
together. But after the b-o-o-oom of a great gun it became brisker
usually; often so much so as to suggest that some of Lee's ragged
brigades, their march silenced by the rain, had pierced our fore-front
again, and were "gobbling up" our boys on picket, and flinging up new
rifle-pits on the acres reclaimed for a night and a day for the
tottering Confederacy.

Sometimes the _crack-a-rac-a-rack_ would die down to a slow fire of
dropping shots, and the forts seemed sleeping; and patter, patter,
patter on the veteran canvas we heard the rain, rain, rain, not unlike
the roll of steady musketry very far away.

I think I sit again beside Charley Wilson, my sick "buddy," and hear
his uneven breathing through all the stamping of the rows of wet
horses on their corduroy floor roofed with leaky pine brush.

That _squ-ush, squ-ush_ is the sound of the stable-guard's boots as he
paces slowly through the mud, to and fro, with the rain rattling on
his glazed poncho and streaming corded hat. Sometimes he stops to
listen to a frantic brawling of the wagon-train mules, sometimes to
the reviving picket-firing. It crackles up to animation for causes
that we can but guess; then dies down, never to silence, but warns,
warns, as the distant glow of the sky above a volcano warns of the
huge waiting forces that give it forth.

I think I hear Barney Donahoe pulling our latch-string that November
night when we first heard of the great Thanksgiving dinner that was
being collected in New York for the army.

"Byes, did yez hear phwat Sergeant Cunningham was tellin' av the
Thanksgivin' turkeys that's comin'?"

"Come in out of the rain, Barney," says Charley, feebly.

"Faith, I wish I dar', but it's meself is on shtable-guard. Bedad,
it's a rale fire ye've got. Divil a better has ould Jimmy himself (our
colonel). Ye've heard tell of the turkeys, then, and the pois?"

"Yes. Bully for the folks at home!" says Charley. "The notion of
turkey next Thursday has done me good already. I was thinking I'd go
to hospital to-morrow, but now I guess