Haines Bluff. We did
not leave on the 23d, as was rumored, but are still in our old camp, enjoying a
short season of repose preparatory to our voyage up the river. It is a repose
much needed by our men. What prompted our commander to hurry us through as he
did sixty miles in three days—I cannot conceive. Strict orders were issued
against straggling. No man would be allowed to leave the ranks without a
written pass from the Surgeon, and all stragglers were to be picked up by the
Provost Guard and taken to headquarters for trial by court martial. The General
"reckoned without his host." Some men, so great was their respect for
discipline, marched in the ranks until they fell, in a dying condition. But
most of them cursed the General and his orders and sat down to rest and cool
off whenever their judgment told them they were getting too hot, and, when
rested, came on again.
After the first day,
no attention was paid to orders. Men fell out in such numbers the Provost could
not arrest them, and came straggling into camp until nearly morning.
The next morning
after our arrival, in the Seventeenth alone, one hundred twenty men were
reported unfit for duty, and forty-five are now sick in hospital. Doubtless
much of this sickness is the effect of the poisonous liquid we were compelled
to use for cooking and drinking purposes. How grateful to us, then, is the
delicious, sparkling water that flows in abundance from that romantic spring I
described on our first arrival. Before I leave this subject, let me record our
experience the week we were encamped before Jackson. The first day we used
cistern water, but that soon failed. After that, all that was left for coffee
and for cooking purposes was water from an artificial pond, scooped out in a
barnyard, and all the battery and camp horses—five or six hundred of them in
number—were watered there every day. They were ridden right into the pond!
Rather than drink it, I have been three miles to the rear, after having been on
duty all day, for a canteen of cistern water.
SOURCE: David Lane,
A Soldier's Diary: The Story of a Volunteer, 1862-1865, p. 71-2