Camp Hicks, Near Frederick, December 29, 1861,
Sunday Evening.
We are drinking the lees of the old year! It is the penitent
reminiscent season. We may look back along the furrow that our little
individual ploughshare seems to us to be making. Few of us, indeed, can see
that the past retains the mark of our labor. All of us, however, can whip up
our teams on New Year's morning, and open a new furrow in a new field, or
plough the same ground over again, with new zeal.
Such is the illusion of hope, and so glad are we to postpone
repentance another year. And, indeed, this bright Sunday morning wins one hopeward.
Since Christmas morning I have been busy with our Examining
Board. The work is amusing; but it is also pitiable to see what ignorance and
incapacity are to be weeded out of the army.
Yesterday we had a visit in camp from Mr. and Mrs. –––. You
recollect charming Miss –––. Well, she shone like a star upon our darkness. Her
presence in my tent, which she honored, has left a sort of halo which cheers it
still. The first glimpse of womanhood and loveliness I have had for an age, as
it seems. The past is so crowded that it seems very distant.
The Drainsville “affair” turns out, in the magnitude of its
consequences, a battle and a defeat.
"Io Triumphe”!! McClellan promises Porter's division an
occasion, shortly, to show by fighting, as well as in reviews, that they are
soldiers. This by his Christmas order. Who knows but my house which I begin to
build to-morrow will stand rather as a monument than as a dwelling?
I must say I think the tonic of victory would be of most
happy and invigorating influence. Give me a little of the “ecstasy of strife.”
Bother this constant rehearsal.
–––has caught the cavalry complaint, and is off for a
captaincy. So we go. The Second radiates its good influence, and every new
enterprise borrows our light.
If we could only have the baptism of battle, perhaps these
young men would not be in such haste to leave. Good by, and a Happy New Year to
all at home.
SOURCE: Elizabeth Amelia Dwight, Editor, Life and
Letters of Wilder Dwight: Lieut.-Col. Second Mass. Inf. Vols., p. 182-3
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