We were aroused this
morning at 3 o'clock and ordered to be ready to march at 5 o'clock. In a very
few minutes hundreds of fires were brightly glowing, striving by their feeble
rays to dispel the gloom of night. At the appointed hour we were up and away
with hearts as light and buoyant as though privations, toil and danger were
unknown. The morning was delightfully cool, and before the god of day had risen
to scorch us with his burning rays, nearly half our day's march was done. The
rest of the day was made easy by frequent halts, and when, at 2 o'clock p. m.,
we filed into line and stacked arms, all were agreeably surprised. We had
marched twelve miles.
Today is the
anniversary of our first battle—our baptism. The mind naturally reverts to that
trying time, and all its scenes pass rapidly in review. Then, for the first
time, we met face to face our country's foe. The chivalry of the South then met
the mudsills of Michigan and learned to respect them. Today we met them again,
but not in battle array. As we were starting, this morning, we came upon 2,300
prisoners taken at Cumberland Gap. They were free to talk, and a more ignorant
lot of semi-savages I never met. We could not convince them that Vicksburg or
Port Hudson were in our possession. They were very "frank," and
indulged freely in epithets and pet names.
9 o'clock p. m. Our camp is in a beautiful grove, on the
banks of a "babbling brook." A cool, delicious breeze is gently
blowing from the west. The sky is cloudless, and the bright, scintillating
stars shine out in unwonted brilliancy, and the pale moon is pouring down upon
the earth a flood of silvery light. It is an ideal night in which to rest after
a fatiguing march-an ideal night, so seem to think our boys, in which to
celebrate the anniversary of our first battle. The Sutler came up about sundown
with the "accessories." The preliminaries have been gone through
with, and the "celebration is in full blast." Pandemonium reigns.
This quiet glen has been transformed, for the time being, into the council hall
of demons. Men fall upon each other's necks and weep, and laugh, and
drivel, and shout "’Rah for Seventeenth Michigan." It was an
impressive ceremony, and one in which all allusions to the brave men who fell
and sympathy for their bereaved families were considerately left out, lest they
wound the tender sensibilities of the living.
SOURCE: David Lane, A Soldier's Diary: The Story of
a Volunteer, 1862-1865, pp. 91-3
