[The Red Acorn by John McElroy]@TWC D-Link book
The Red Acorn

CHAPTER XVIII
2/33

It had scouted and raided; it had reconnoitered and guarded; it had chased guerrillas through the Winter's rain and mud for days and nights together; it had followed John Morgan's dashing troopers along limestone turnpikes that glowed like brick-kilns under the July sun until three-fourths of the regiment had dropped by the roadside in sheer exhaustion; it had marched over the mountains to Cumberland Gap, and back over the mountains to Lexington; across Kentucky and Tennessee to Huntsville, Ala., back across those States to the Ohio River, and again back across Kentucky to Nashville, beside side marches as numerous as the branches on a tree; 50 per cent.

of its number had fallen victims to sickness and hardship, and 10 per cent.

more had been shot, here and there, a man or two at a time, on the picket or skirmish line, at fords or stockades guarding railroad bridges.

But while other regiments which had suffered nothing like it had painted on their banners "Mill Springs," "Shiloh," and "Perryville," its colors had yet to receive their maiden inscription.

This was the hard luck of many of the regiments in the left wing of Buell's army in 1862.
Kent Edwards, whose promotion to the rank of Sergeant, and reduction for some escapade had been a usual monthly occurence during the year, was fond of saying that the regiment was not sent to the field to gain martial glory, but to train as book agents to sell histories of the struggle, "When This Cruel War is Over." Whereupon Abe Bolton would improve the occasion to invoke a heated future for every person in authority, from the President down to the Fifth Corporal.
But for all this the 400 hardy boys who still remained to answer roll-call, out of the 1,100 that had crossed the Ohio River in September, 1861, were as fine a body of fighting men as ever followed a flag, and there was no better soldier among them than Harry Glen.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books