Robert Stiles, Four years under Marse Robert

[241] of this campaign, which ought to be in print, is emphatic in stating that the same old familiar spirit of lighthearted jollity and fun characterized the men of the battery, and of the commands they encountered and passed on the 4th and 5th of May, as we all poured from our winter quarters down into the Wilderness fight.

Billy, on the contrary,--my Billy, who has already appeared frequently in these reminiscences,--is of very different mind and memory touching this point. His recollection is that he was deeply impressed with the change, and as he had just made his way back from furlough through the army, and passed the night with an infantry regiment from his own county that contained many of his former schoolmates and friends and neighbors, he had enjoyed rather unusual opportunities for testing the matter. He did not detect any depression, or apprehension of disaster, or weakness of pluck or purpose; but he says he did miss the bounding, buoyant spirit, the effervescent outbursts, the quips, the jests, the jokes, the jollities, such as had usually characterized the first spring rousings of the army and the first meetings and minglings of the different commands as they shouted their tumultuous way to battle. He says that there seems to have sifted through the ranks the conviction that the struggle ahead of us was of a different character from any we had experienced in the past — a sort of premonition of the definite mathematical calculation, in whose hard, unyielding grip it was intended our future should be held and crushed.

Billy mentions as a fact, which tends to demonstrate that his analysis of the views and feelings of the men is correct, that every man in our battery who was absent on furlough the 1st of May, 1864, returned instantly, some of them having just reached home. I cannot forbear mentioning that Billy was one of these latter, and my youngest brother, who had joined us from Georgia some months before, another. Some of these men arrived before we left camp at Morton's Ford; and others walked many hours, following the solemn sound of the firing, and found us in the midst of the sombre Wilderness, and two at bloody Spottsylvania. One of these two, a Petersburg boy, was delayed because of having fought