War Stories

Back in the 80s, as a favor for a co-worker, I retyped a bunch of excerpts from the diary of an ancestor of his, who had been a private in a Pennsylvania regiment during the Civil War. I wasn't working from the original, but from some old typed transcriptions. These were fragile and falling apart, and he was worried about preserving the accounts. (Ironically, I retyped them onto 8-inch floppies, which would soon become more useless than the yellowed typescripts.)

It was fascinating, more fun than work. A grunt's-eye rather than a historian's-eye view of the war. One thing he was greatly concerned with was fortifications; apparently everywhere they stopped, even if only for a night, they spent hours putting up “breastworks." Julius Caesar would have been proud. Another big thing was water. Many, many entries about water. The water at So-And-So Creek was bad, and nine of the boys took sick. We're to bivouac at So-And-So Town tomorrow; they say the water there is good. And so on. A military maxim says: amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. Lower-ranked professionals, apparently, talked a lot about digging, and good water.

Anyway, two stories from the diary amused me so much that I still remember them.

Story 1: One night, in bivouac, some boys from a neighboring company had snuck out and shot a pig, and were eating "high on the hog." The next night, two guys from the writer's company decided they'd do the same. They loaded their rifles and slipped out, but they didn't find anything to shoot, and came back empty-handed. It was against orders to have loaded weapons in the camp, so on the way back they fired their rifles into a tree. (I guess you couldn't just unload a muzzle-loader.) A picket heard the shots and came to investigate, and the two were brought before the Sergeant of the Guard, and got punishment drill for discharging weapons inside company lines.

Story 2: During the Vicksburg campaign, the writer was part of the garrison of a fort, which was cut off and surrounded by the enemy. They weren't too worried, as their position was a strong one, and they expected to be relieved in a few days (and they were). The day after they were cut off, a party of Confederates approached the fort under a flag of truce, to parley. They surrendered their weapons at the gate, and were led in to see the Union commander. They demanded the fort's surrender, and were told "Nuts!" or the nineteenth-century equivalent. When they retrieved their weapons at the gate, the Confederate Colonel's prized fancy revolver (ivory- or pearl-handled, I forget which) was missing. The Union commander, outraged at this blot on his honor, turned out the garrison and had all the tents and bedrolls searched, but they didn't find the pistol. So, the Colonel rode away mightily pissed off, and some Union soldier scored a nice souvenir.