Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/744

718 almost at the last gasp with pain and fatigue. We reeled, crawled, and almost rolled toward Alexandria. As night fell, the pace increased, and the whooping became continuous, and we seemed like a column of maniacs. But in the last two miles, in the pitchy darkness between eight and nine of the evening, a silence of despair descended upon us, and then the regiments melted like frost in sunshine. I could not see who fell out of my company, and I did not care. My whole official sentiment of honor was concentrated, under the flame of intense physical suffering, into the one little idea of getting myself to Alexandria with the colors, no matter who else dropped by the way. The few men remaining in the organization reeled on speechlessly. If they passed a dying artillery horse, they no longer shouted, with savage defiance, "Fresh horses! bring on your horses!" They had stopped muttering curses against Banks and the Confederates—those two enemies. They were at the point, morally, of unspeakable desperation, and, physically, of mere movement in one direction, without a thought or a sentiment beyond what was necessary to put one foot before the other, and to lean toward Alexandria.

If the enemy had been there we could not have fought him nor run away from him. But, fortunately, there was no enemy within twenty miles of us, as there had been none from the hour we started. God alone knows why we marched thus; our commander has probably forgotten. We had nothing more to boast of than that we had accomplished thirty-four miles in one day, and eighty-seven miles in the whole burst of seventy-six hours, to which Company D, of the Twelfth Connecticut, had added five miles by a nocturnal foraging expedition. About one-third of the regiment stacked arms in the little wood where we bivouacked, and nearly all the remainder straggled in before morning. That night I was too tired to eat, and went contentedly to sleep without supper.

It is astonishing what some men will do for chickens. I had just laid myself down when one of my privates, who had dropped out an hour before under pretence of being exhausted, made his appearance with an armful of fowls. Calling up the straggler, I confiscated his plunder and divided it among those who had stuck to the colors. The next morning I learned that this indefatigable hen-hawk had been off on another hunting bout of two miles or more, and had supped on a fresh dozen of chickens before lying down to his virtuous slumbers. The owls ought to hold that man in everlasting hatred; he is physically and morally capable of taking the meat out of their mouths.

Longer and more rapid forced marches than this of ours have been made, but I am glad that I was not called upon to assist at the performance. We should not have suffered so much as we did had it not been for the heat, which not only wore out our muscular forces, but greatly increased the blistering of our feet.

Perhaps it is worth while to mention that, after two or three days of repose, we were excessively proud of our thirty-four miles in a day, and were ready to march with any other brigade in the army for a wager.