ive
the enemy out the other side of town, kill as many as possible, and when
they go out they will be attacked by another Union regiment that has
been sent around to the rear. There is a railroad there, and a bridge
across a river, Confederate stores of ammunition, provisions, cotton,
etc. The stores are to be burned, the railroad bridge destroyed,
the track torn up, engines, if there are any, are to be ditched, and
everything destroyed except private residences. You understand?" The
officers said they did, and they went back to their companies and
ordered the men to get a bite to eat. When the officers had gone I was
pretty scared, and I said, "Colonel, suppose the rebels do not get out
of that town." The colonel was chewing a hard-tack when he answered.
Daylight was just streaking up from the East, and he held a piece of
the hard-tack up to the light to pick a worm out of it, after which
he answered: "If they don't get out, we will, those of us who are not
killed. I always like to eat hard-tack in the dark, then I can't see the
worms." To say that I was reassured would be untrue. I admired a man who
could mingle business with pleasure, as he did when talking of possible
death and worms in hard-tack, but death was never an interesting subject
to me. I wanted to talk with the colonel more, and asked him if colonels
often get killed, and if an orderly was exactly safe in his immediate
vicinity, but he leaned against a tree and went to sleep, and I stood
near, as wide awake as any man ever was. I wondered whose idea it was
to send us fifty miles into the Confederacy to destroy provisions and
railroads.

Did they suppose the Confederates didn't want anything to eat. I thought
it was a mean man or government that would burn up good wholesome
provisions because they couldn't eat them themselves. And who owned this
railroad that was going to be torn up? Why burn a bridge that probably
cost several hundred thousand dollars. As I was thinking these
things over and finding fault with the persons responsible for such
foolishness, the chaplain, who had not showed up during the night, came
up to where I was, without any hat, leading his horse, which was lame.
The first thing he asked me how I would trade horses. They all wanted
my Jen, but he was not in the market. The chaplain said he had caught
up with the regiment about midnight, and had rode at the rear, with the
horse-doctor. He said this expedition was foolish, and had no obj