The air is full of
rumors to-day that we are to go somewhere, and that very soon, yet no one seems
to be able to trace them. Experience has taught us that we won't know for
certain when we go until we start, nor where we go until we get there.
Train-loads of soldiers keep going past, and have been going past nearly every
day since we came here. Seems to me I never saw such a dry place. Everything is
so coated with dust it is impossible to tell its original color. From
appearances, the country all about us is dried up and dead. A wounded soldier
has been here from the hospital. He was at Antietam—was shot through the arm,
which is still in a sling. But the most wonderful thing was that as he was
going off the field another ball hit him, or rather hit a pocket Testament in
his breast pocket, and was stopped against the back cover, after going through
the front cover and the rest of the book. He had both the ball and the
Testament to show. What a sermon could be preached with that book and bullet
for a text!
SOURCE:
Lawrence Van Alstyne, Diary of an Enlisted Man, p. 47
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