 |
| A footsore straggler. |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[343]
halt to occur before parting with a portion of his load, if it oppressed him; but a recruit would hang to his until he bent over at an angle of 45° from a vertical, with his eyes staring, his lower jaw hanging, and his face dripping with moisture.
If you were to follow the column after, say, the first two miles, you would find various articles scattered along at intervals by the roadside, where a soldier quietly stepped out of the ranks, sat down, unslung his knapsack or his blanket-roll, took out what he had decided to throw away, again equipped himself, and, thus relieved, hastened on to overtake the regiment.
It did not take an army long to get into light marching order after it was once fairly on the road.
I have been dealing with the first day out of settled camp.
On subsequent days, of course the same programme would not be enacted.
And, again, if a man clung to his effects till noon, he was likely to do so for the day, as after noon the thought of shelter for the night nerved
him to hold on. But men would drop out in the afternoon of the first day for another reason.
They blistered or chafed their feet and sat; down at the first stream to bathe them,
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.