Monday, August 12, 2024

Diary of Private John J. Wyeth, December 15, 1862

After turning in last night it was impossible to sleep, the cause being the music of a band farther down the railroad track. It was a serenade to the general, probably, but we took it all in. Our batteries had been practising all the evening on the hill occupied by the rebels, altogether making it lively, but conducive to sleep.

At half-past four this morning we were aroused by the usual drum-beat, ate breakfast, and started once more; and as we had more resting than fighting yesterday, we were in a comparatively good condition, marching out of Kinston in good spirits. We crossed the river by the same bridge where the fight occurred, and, after burning it, took the road towards Goldsboro. Nothing worthy of note turned up to-day but our toes and heels alternately, which did not interest us much. After a steady march of sixteen miles, we encamped in a cornfield on the right of the road. (About all the fields we ever did camp in were cornfields.) We would have liked a potatoe-patch or dry cranberry meadow for a change, but probably Col. Lee or the exigencies of the case demanded a cornfield. If the colonel had been obliged to have slept once across the rows of these or between them, filled as they oftentimes were with water, he would have picked out other quarters without doubt. This camp is about five miles from a place called Whitehall, where they say we are to "catch it."

SOURCE: John Jasper Wyeth, Leaves from a Diary Written While Serving in Co. E, 44 Mass. Dep’t of North Carolina from September 1862 to June 1863, p. 26

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