every little thing!

Then he worked them! Nothing satisfied him. At each mistake, a blast of
sarcasm. He spoke of the "accordion-pleated line." He gave a fling at a
lost corporal: "As soon as we recover our derelict flanking squad, now
about a hundred yards ahead." The men came slinking back. He withered one
individual. "That belt is on exactly right. Except that it's upside down
and inside out, it's exactly right." At whatever distance he went, I
could hear every word. And whenever the company came close, I could hear
the men in the ranks, murmur, murmur, murmur. You can't treat such men
so. Of course they're disgusted with him.

* * * * *

Sep. 15.

Such a humiliation today! And such a discovery! I suppose you didn't tell
me that Dick was here because you thought I'd prefer not to know it.
We're perfectly aware of each other's neighborhood now. This is the way
of it.

This afternoon, being tired of the continual drilling on the parade
ground, I slipped away before it could begin, and leaving the Colonel at
his nap, went walking out a gravel road that I've for some time wished to
explore. It took me along a rather desolate tract of scrub land, with
nothing ahead but the distant Adirondacks; so at last, seeing a little
hill to the left, I thought I'd try if I could see the lake from it, and
perhaps sit there awhile in quiet. I struck out across this piece of very
desolate country, with little bushes growing but no grass, not good for
pasture nor for anything but one purpose which I didn't then suspect.
Soon I found myself walking along a ditch which kept cutting me off from
the hill, a ditch in the driest of sandy land and as deep as my chin, all
shored up with cut poles, or sometimes with plank, or with bundles of
twigs, or with willow basket work. And then I saw it was a trench!

The Plattsburgers must have made it. It ran all about, experimentally. It
had here a shelter of sandbags, there a dugout, there a kitchen. It was
made in different ways to show how to use material, I suppose. Really it
was very clever. And then when I came too near it at one place, to study
it, the rotten wood gave way with me, and so as not to have to fall I was
forced to jump, right down into it. And there I was! When I tried to get
up at the half-broken place, I was overwhelmed by a shower of sand.
Everywhere else the walls wer