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A Minor War History Compiled from a Soldier Boy's Letters to "the Girl I Left Behind Me": 1861-1864 cover

A Minor War History Compiled from a Soldier Boy's Letters to "the Girl I Left Behind Me": 1861-1864

Chapter 41: XXXVIII
By Martin A. Haynes
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About This Book

A series of wartime letters written between 1861 and 1864 to a loved one presents an intimate account of camp routine, marches, garrison duty, and occasional skirmishes, emphasizing comradeship, small talk, humor, and the routine hardships of soldiers. The editor removed strictly personal matters and arranged the correspondence into sketches that preserve individual personalities and camp anecdotes, recording everyday details—meals, guard duty, uniforms, morale—rather than grand strategy, and offering a ground-level portrait of military life and memory.

XXXVIII

Camp Beaufort,
Charles Co., Md., Jan. 19, 1862.

HORRIBLE weather! It is almost inconceivably muddy, and today it is raining. I went out to watch the batteries work, today, and it was a question sometimes whether I wouldn’t have to leave my boots in the mud. We have spells of cold weather, with a little snow, but it soon gets warm and rains.

Jim Carr, of our company, cut his foot terribly with an axe, yesterday. The blade went right through the bones, and he will be crippled for a long time.

I have studied it out that we will not trouble the rebels on the other side for some time yet. We are building big mortar rafts up at Baltimore, to be used in shelling out the rebel batteries. It will take some time to get them ready, of course; but when the time does come there will be music in the air.

Last week I helped dig out a rebel shell. It was buried seven feet in the solid earth and must have traveled over four miles.