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| Fatigue call (infantry). |
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The artillery were almost never detailed for fatigue duty outside of their own company.
The only exception now occurring to me was when an artillery brigade headquarters was established near by, and an occasional detail was made and sent there for temporary service; but that was all. Our camp fatigue duty consisted in policing or cleaning camp, building stables, or perhaps I should more accurately designate them if I called them shelters, for the horses and mules, burying horses, getting wood and water, and washing gun-carriages and caissons for inspections.
This building of horse-shelters was at times no mean or trivial enterprise, and sometimes employed a great many men a great many days.
When the army was on the march, with no danger impending, the horses were unharnessed and tied to the picket-rope.
This was a rope about two hundred feet long and two inches in diameter, which, when the battery was drawn up in park, was hitched to the outer hind wheel of a caisson on one flank of the battery, and then carried through the hind wheels and over the ammunition-chests of the intervening caissons and made fast to a hind wheel of the caisson on the other flank.
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