CXXI
Point Lookout, Md.,Sunday, December 6, 1863.
Point Lookout, Md.,Sunday, December 6, 1863.
Point Lookout, Md.,Sunday, December 6, 1863.
Point Lookout, Md.,
Sunday, December 6, 1863.
IFI had only known, I need not have been dreading, as I have, the cold nights coming, with guard duty out in the snow and rain. I have served now coming on three years, without asking any favors nor getting any. But last Tuesday Colonel Bailey issued an order detailing me as mail carrier for this regiment. It is decidedly the softest job at Point Lookout. I am entirely relieved from all guard duty and drill. Our mail comes in every other day, and I go down to the boat—about a quarter of a mile—bring up the mail and distribute it, and the next morning carry the outgoing mail down to the boat. That is all there is to it. Really an army postmaster, Jesse Dewey has been performing double duty for a time, as orderly sergeant and mail carrier, but the two jobs interfered with each other, and I am the beneficiary.
During the past week our regiment received an installment of about 175 substitutes. Company I got a dose of twenty. There are a few good men among them, but they are mighty few. Most of them are foreigners, and many of them are just watching for an opportunity to desert. Three or four got away the other night in a boat that came ashore from one of the gunboats. The officer left his boat without a guard, and perhaps there wasn’t any swearing when he came for it and it was gone. It takes the iron hand to keep such a gang in bounds. More than twenty of them have already been tied up to the flagstaff, bucked and gagged, or otherwise disciplined. We have never had a guard around our camp until today, but now it is to be a fixture. So much extra work for the boys, all on account of these human vermin that New Hampshire is filling up her old regiments with. The old men are terribly disgruntled. It makes no difference to me personally, and it does seem good to turn in every night for an unbroken rest. The story is going that we are to be relieved by detachments of the Invalid Corps and sent to the front before long. I have no idea though that we will be sent away until the spring campaign opens. George Colby came down the first of the week and is clerking in Bailey’s sutler shop. [Geo. H., then of Manchester, and later, until his tragic death, in the employ of the railroad at Plymouth, N. H.]