A gallop twenty miles
up the valley to where Minty kept watch and ward upon our flank with his
trusty horsemen; a dinner at that hospitable mess-table, furnished maybe
with a pig which had strayed from its home not wholly through natural
perversity; and then a lively ride back in the early evening,--this,
indeed, was pleasure.
The charm of campaigning is its rapidly-succeeding surprises. The
general of the army may be proceeding regularly in the path he marked
out months before. The corps commanders, and even the chiefs of
division, may sometimes be able to foresee the movements from day to
day. But to their subordinates everything is a surprise: they lie down
at night in delightful uncertainty as to where the next sunset will find
them, and they sit down to a breakfast of hard bread and bacon, relieved
by a little foraging from the country, not sure that their coffee will
cool before the bugle sounds a signal to pack and be off, to Heaven
knows where. We found this charm of surprise, as we had hundreds of
times before in other places, at our camp in the valley of the
Tennessee. The alternating quick and droning notes of "the general" made
us spring up from the mess-table one morning, and in a moment the lazy
encampment was all hurry and bustle. An aide leaped upon his horse at
head-quarters and dashed off on the road to the river, and we saw that
the servants of General Hazen, our brigade commander, were stripping his
baggage of the small impedimenta which accumulate so rapidly even in a
few days of rest, but are abandoned when the army starts on an active
campaign.
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