A Discouraging statement.
A member of the 19th Ohio regiment, writing from camp, near
Nashville, to a paper at home says that, at the present rate of decimation, one-half of the forty thousand Buckeyes placed at the disposal of
Lincoln last fall will be dead or lost to the service by the first of May.
This, he says, has not been done by fighting, and asks: "What has been gained by the sacrificed." If the laid left do not learn a little wisdom they are not apt scholars.
That the writer is wiser as well as sadder, the following extract from his letter will show:
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In response to the last call of the
President for more troops
Ohio placed at his disposal 40,000 more of her loyal at the present rate of decimation 20,000 of these will be dead and for ever lost to the service by the first of March next , if not already lost.
Has it been done by fighting?
How much have we gained by the sacrifice?
Absolutely nothing.
In the next battle in this department, if not defeated, we will be unable to achieve a complete success, for the want of a heavy reserve force to follow up any success that may crown our efforts.
Then will the cry go forth as to what has become of the 120,000 men of
Buell's army.
Eighty thousand of those men were raw troops, fresh from the workshops, fields few offices, stores, colleges and school rooms.
Of that eighty thousand, I am satisfied that two-thirds are to day unfit for service; half are little better than dead men; many indeed, but did they most death on the find of battle, amid the crash of arms, dealing death and destruction to traitors!
No; want of food, want of clothing, want of medical attention, an overtrain of the physical system before they were murid to the toils and privations of camp life.
I write this to prove to you the necessity of husbanding our men. This is to be a war of years, and we must prepare for it. This army has been so injured and decimated by its past treatment that fresh levies of troops must be made.
Volunteering will never be resorted to again.
Then, if you would save life, save money, and save our nation, establish your military camps in every county in the loyal States, and require every able bodied man to learn war; let a draft be more and a sufficient number of men be put into camp for seasoning, with which to replenish regiments that are decimated by disease.
You do not conceive nor can you, even by the most extravagant stretch of your imaginative powers reality the bitterness and almost universal determination of these people to be separate and independent.
They have the most productive and fertile sell on the globe, with a splendid climate and mountain fastnesses to which they can retire when detested.
Their lines of communication are in the interior of rebeldom, giving them the facility of concentrating men with speed, case, and safety; and as for starving them, that is impossible, unless we destroy their means of reproducing; and to do this we must first occupy the country, whereas we now only occupy the outer edges of rebeldom, leaving the great bears and centre of it untouched.
As to freshing them out by depriving them of clothing each family makes it a point to keep their sons clothed, not in the least depending on the
Government for it; and as for there who have no one to clothes them, they strip our dead and clothe themselves.
Now, do not say I am a cloaker, because I do not flatter I tell you the naked truth, that you may know what is necessary for you to do that success may crown our efforts.
Did I not do this I should be false to myself and recreant to my Government.
I do not write thus to encourage you, but to serve you to greater exertions.
We have been in great haste to be to this war speedily, and our success has been limited.
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