The Maine bugle ... campaign; 1-5 Jan. 1894-Oct. 1898 - Maine.gov

WITH GENERAL SHERIDAN. 303
quarters, cowered under their scant shelters, or dragged them-
selves slowly along to their place in line, clogged with mud and
weighed down with the drenching rain. In every by-way and
in every field wagons were hopelessly imbedded in the glutinous
soil. Drivers and mules had given it up, and the former
smoked their pipes calmly under the wagons, while the latter
turned tail to the storm and clustered around the feed-box,
where they had put their heads together from habit, for there
was nothing in the box to eat, and they must have been asses
if they hoped the forage-wagons would get to the front that
day. General Sheridan, water dripping from every angle of his
face and clothes, was ushered into the presence and councils
of the lieutenant-general, and between them they soon settled
that, as it was within the limits of horse possibility for cavalry
to move, they would move a little and see what came of it,
if only to pass the time, for on a day like this the most ardent
man must find employment or he will begin to think that he is
a helpless party to a fiasco, which it must be acknowledged we
all appeared to be just then. The only thing probably that
could have amused the company on that inauspicious morning
would have been an excited horseman straining through the
treacherous soil, waving his hat, and crying out that Lee would
surrender to Grant one hundred miles from there in ten days
from date. That would have been extremely amusing, and the
toughest veteran would have smiled grimly.
Very hopeful, but somewhat incredulous, were the veterans,
and it was rather their fashion to scoff in the last year of the
war. There were precedents for all sorts of campaigns except
"the last," and the old troops were somewhat skeptical when
that was predicted. They had something of the feeling of the
man in " Used Up," who has been everywhere and seen every-
thing—been up Mount Vesuvius, looked down the crater and
found nothing in it. Lee had escaped them by only so much
as Tam O'Shanter's mare escaped at the bridge, and possibly
for the reason that armies like witches are balked by streams,
as the Potomac and Rappahannock would seem to testify.