m an
ignominious fate, and again, in their hearts, they blessed the man who
was always the soldier's friend.

We resumed our place the next day after the battle, on the front line,
and commenced digging.

Fierce night sorties were again made by the enemy and bravely resisted
by our boys, who continued the work regardless of these annoyances. Only
one fight occurred on our part of the line after the 16th, in which we
lost any number of men. On the 28th the First brigade had a skirmish in
which we lost one killed and half a dozen wounded. Among the latter was
Lieutenant, afterward Colonel Milliken, of the Forty-third New York. A
reconnoissance on the left about the same time, resulted in finding the
rebels in considerable force, and a loss of two good soldiers to the
Seventy-seventh New York. In the meantime earthworks of great strength
were being thrown up on the right of the line before Yorktown, and
everything was being put in a complete state of preparation for the
grand bombardment. Enormous siege guns of one hundred and even two
hundred pound calibre, and immense mortars were brought up and mounted
in the earthworks, and it was thought that with the powerful means we
were using the fall of Yorktown was only a question of time.

Our losses by the rebels before Yorktown were not great, but the ravages
by disease were fearful. Many thousands of noble fellows who would
gladly have braved the dangers of the battle-field, were carried to the
rear with fevers engendered by the deadly malaria of the swamps, from
which few ever recovered sufficiently to rejoin the ranks; and thousands
of others were laid in humble graves along the marshy borders of the
Warwick or about the hospitals at Young's Mills. For a month the men
were almost continually under arms; often called in the middle of the
night to resist the attempts of the enemy to force our line under cover
of the thick darkness, standing in line of battle day after day and
digging at earthworks night after night.

During the thirty days of the siege we had twenty days of rain. Thunder
storms followed each other in quick succession, with lightnings more
vivid than we had ever seen at the north. Men lay down to rest at night
with their equipments buckled about them and wet to their skins. Men
unaccustomed to the hardships of campaigning could not endure such
exposure.

A few divisions of the army performed by far the greater part of the
labor, either because they had