This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[404]
the news, and the natural result was the enemy changed the code.
This took place just before Sherman's attack on Kenesaw Mountain (June, 1864), and it is to the hundreds slaughtered there that he probably refers.
General Thomas was ordered to arrest the reporter, and have him hanged as a spy; but old “Pap” Thomas' kind heart banished him to the north of the Ohio for the remainder of the war, instead.
When Sherman's headquarters were at Big Shanty, there was a signal station located in his rear, on the roof of an old gin-house, and this signal officer, having the “key” to the enemy's signals, reported to Sherman that he had translated this signal from Pine Mountain to Marietta,--“Send an ambulance for General Polk's body,” --which was the first tidings received by our army that the fighting bishop had been slain.
He was hit by a shell from a volley of artillery fired by order of General Sherman.
To the men in the other arms of the service, who saw this mysterious and almost continuous waving of flags, it seemed as if every motion was fraught with momentous import.
“What could it all be about?”
they would ask one another.
A signal station was located, in ‘61-2, on the top of what was known as the Town Hall (since burned) in Poolesville, Md., within a few rods of my company's camp, and, to the best of my recollection, not an hour of daylight passed without more or less flag-waving from that point.
This particular squad of men did not seem at all fraternal, but kept aloof, as if (so we thought) they feared they might, in an unguarded moment, impart some of the important secret information which had been received by them from the station at Sugar Loaf Mountain or Seneca.
Since the war, I have learned that their apparently excited and energetic performances were, for the most part, only practice between stations for the purpose of acquiring familiarity with the code, and facility in using it.
It may be thought that the duties of the Signal Corps were always performed in positions where their personal
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.