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full of a good many different shells.
The good Colonel de Chanal took a ride with me. He is so funny, with his sentimental French ways.
He, with a true French appreciation of wood, looks with honest horror on the felling of a tree.
As we rode along, there was a teamster, cutting down an oak for some trivial purpose.
“Ah,” cried De Chanal, “Ah!
encore un chene; encore un beau chene!”
If you tell him twenty men have been killed in the trenches, he is not interested; but actually he notices each tree that falls.
“Ah,” he says, “when I think what labor I have been at, on the little place I have at home, to plant, only for my grandchildren, such trees as you cut down without reason!”
As he has always lived in the South of France, where greenery is scarce, he is not offended by the bareness of the soil; but when riding through a dreary pine wood, will suddenly break out: “Oh, que c'est beau, que c'est beau!”
July 30, 1864
My spirits to-night are not very high; our project of attack, which in the beginning promised well, has not been a success in the result.
You must know that there has always been a point on Burnside's line that was quite near that of the enemy, say 250 feet. A mine was begun there over a month since, and has been quite finished for a week.
It was at first rather an amateur affair, for the policy of the future operations had not then been fixed.
However, it was steadily pushed, being in charge of Colonel Pleasants, who has a regiment of Pennsylvania coal-miners.
He first ran a subterranean gallery, straight out to the enemy's bastion, where they had four guns.
Then three lateral passages were made, each terminating in a chamber, to be filled with gunpowder.
These chambers or magazines were 