A campaign in Mexico

Chapter 2: PREFACE.

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About This Book

A volunteer's first-person narrative recounts enlistment, embarkation, and life in camp during a military campaign in Mexico. Entries trace daily movements, weather and travel hardships, shipboard and tented quarters, and the routines and improvisations soldiers adopt in the field. The author records candid observations about morale, music and camaraderie, tensions between commissioned officers and enlisted men, and the fatigue and privations of campaigning. Descriptions of engagements include accounts of troop positions and maneuvers, accompanied by a contemporary battlefield map intended to clarify the progress of the action.

PREFACE.

In thus bringing myself before the public as an author, I offer no apology. I make no pretensions to literary merit. The following pages were written in the confusion and inconvenience of camp, with limited sources of information, and without any expectation of future publication. I offer nothing but a faithful description of my own feelings, and of incidents in the life of a volunteer. To such as may be interested in an unvarnished relation of facts, connected with the duties, fatigues and perils of a soldier’s life, I respectfully submit this volume.

B. F. SCRIBNER.

New Albany,
Indiana.