A. J. Bennett, private , First Massachusetts Light Battery, The story of the First Massachusetts Light Battery , attached to the Sixth Army Corps : glance at events in the armies of the Potomac and Shenandoah, from the summer of 1861 to the autumn of 1864.

[86] guard arrived, or in spite of the guard. The hay and grain were carried away by necessity, there being mounted troops enough in the vicinity to demand for their horses a much greater supply. Was this justifiable? Oh, no! not morally justifiable. But it is doubtful if war has any ethics. If it has, it is of the utilitarian school, its two leading maxims being: ‘The end justifies the means,’ and ‘All's fair in war.’

Moving up the valley from this place, where we had rested thirty-six hours, we passed over the height of land between the headwaters of the streams that flow into the Potomac from this valley, and those which are tributary to the branches of the Rappahannock, and in the last days of October we were at White Plains, on the Manassas Gap Railroad, west of Thoroughfare Gap in the Bull Run range. Though these plains are in the ‘sunny South,’ the air ‘bites shrewdly’ on them on a morning in late October, and early frosts are incidents of that season in this region, likewise nipping winds from the face of the Blue Ridge. The day before we started to cross the Bull Run range to the plains east of the mountains, the ground was covered with snow, the branches of the shrubbery and wildwood along the run were encrusted with flakes, the waters of the stream looked black and dismal, and a good stiff breeze was blowing from the Blue Ridge some miles to the west. The exterior aspect of camp and surroundings was cheerless, certainly, but a ‘soldier's life is always gay,’ and the influence of a good fire and a dipper of coffee was such upon the inner man as to render him fit and willing the next morning, especially if mounted, to splash through the run at the ford, and then plod along all day over the twisting, muddy, half passable mountain roads that lead to the Warrenton pike on the other side of the range.

This Bull Run range is nothing else than the Virginia section of the Blue or Kittatinny, the most eastern spur of the Appalachian, which commence in New Jersey. It is a very interesting region from a geographical or geological point of view. Some of the most wonderful natural scenes are embraced in this system along the thousand miles of its extent. Rivers cut their way through from the west in winding channels between lofty wooded banks. The veins of the rock structure of this range contain, in its long course from Jersey to Georgia, a wider variety of minerals