Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/334

 326 Southern Historical Society Papers.

respectful and hospitable to that or any other rank when they came to spend a social evening around the company camp-fires.

With a membership representing nearly all callings and profes- sions, some of them men of culture and knowledge of the world, there was a generous comradeship, and the common devotion and daily peril of life and limb wrought bonds of brotherly friendship that relieved the severity of discipline and the irksome restraints of soldier life.

But the Dunn House and all other camps were but temporary and uncertain rests, and its end came in the last days of March, when the sounds of furious fighting around Petersburg told of the opening of another campaign, and warned everybody to be ready to move. How our lines were broken around Petersburg is a story familiar to many of us, and the glory of the ensuing campaign has been often rehearsed. So bright is its record of constancy and heroic deeds that its memory is to-day the proudest recollection of every man who stood to his colors and endured to the end, though doomed to end in disaster and surrender. This halo of glory has almost ob- scured the hardships of that terrible week during which the army marched day and night, with no regular supplies, but depending on such precarious subsistence as could be obtained by foraging in a depleted section of country, while the very air was rife with sounds and omens of disaster.

On the fall of Petersburg, the Dunn House lines were evacuated, during the night of Saturday, April 2. Not many miles had been marched when, early the next morning, the sound of explosions and the smoke of conflagration told the fate of Richmond, and that the enemy was between the company and their homes.

What this means can only be known by those who have endured such an experience. But, with what haste they could, the battery moved over wretched roads crowded with soldiers and teams, splash- ing and tugging through mud and mire. On every hand were signs of hurry and confusion, and all day long hungry stomachs com- plained of waning commissary stores, and nights were made miserable through want of sleep and rest. The poor horses, in bad condition even when resting in camp, were giving out, and by the time Amelia Courthouse was reached, the teams were so broken down by hard marching and want of rest, and the prospect of supplies was so, hopeless that the caissons were abandoned and destroyed. This dire necessity was a fact ominous of disaster, as it was throwing away three-fourths of the ammunition, leaving only that in the limber