[Andersonville Volume 1 by John McElroy]@TWC D-Link bookAndersonville Volume 1 CHAPTER IV 1/14
CHAPTER IV. A BITTER COLD MORNING AND A WARM AWAKENING--TROUBLE ALL ALONG THE LINE -- FIERCE CONFLICTS, ASSAULTS AND DEFENSE--PROLONGED AND DESPERATE STRUGGLE ENDING WITH A SURRENDER. The night had been the most intensely cold that the country had known for many years.
Peach and other tender trees had been killed by the frosty rigor, and sentinels had been frozen to death in our neighborhood.
The deep snow on which we made our beds, the icy covering of the streams near us, the limbs of the trees above us, had been cracking with loud noises all night, from the bitter cold. We were camped around Jonesville, each of the four companies lying on one of the roads leading from the town.
Company L lay about a mile from the Court House.
On a knoll at the end of the village toward us, and at a point where two roads separated,--one of which led to us,--stood a three-inch Rodman rifle, belonging to the Twenty-second Ohio Battery. It and its squad of eighteen men, under command of Lieutenant Alger and Sergeant Davis, had been sent up to us a few days before from the Gap. The comfortless gray dawn was crawling sluggishly over the mountain-tops, as if numb as the animal and vegetable life which had been shrinking all the long hours under the fierce chill. The Major's bugler had saluted the morn with the lively, ringing tarr-r-r-a-ta-ara of the Regulation reveille, and the company buglers, as fast as they could thaw out their mouth-pieces, were answering him. I lay on my bed, dreading to get up, and yet not anxious to lie still. It was a question which would be the more uncomfortable.
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