This pitching a tent was a simple matter. We each of us had a piece of white cotton drill five feet two by four feet eight, with buttons and button-holes on three sides to fasten them together and loops on the opposite side to fasten to pegs. We cut stakes about five feet long with a fork on top, cut a limb a little more than five feet long for a centre-pole held by the forks, put the doubled part across the horizontal pole, and fastened the sides to the ground

USA

A SHELTER TENT

by pegs through the loops. Such a tent could be put up in twenty minutes and

taken down in two, and did well enough in warm and dry weather. It had no floor and was open at both ends, and if the rain continued it soon leaked through, but it was light and convenient and of considerable service, in every way preferable to the larger tents in which earlier in the war groups of men were herded together.

Being only five feet long the tent did not cover us as we slept unless we curled up spoon-fashion, and when it rained we had to double up like a jack-knife. On the march, especially when it rained, we used to put down pine branches for a mattress to keep us off the ground, but often we had to rely on rubber blankets. This last was our principal stand-by. When we threw away our luggage piece by piece on long marches, the rubber blanket and the shelter tent, with the haversack and canteen, were the last to go, and desper

ate indeed was the weariness of the soldier who threw them away.

In winter quarters we built quite elaborate huts, as will be shown hereafter, but the shelter tent was still the roof, and except when the rain was prolonged it usually served us fairly well. We soon learned not to brush our heads against the tent when it rained, for that would at once set the cloth to leaking. Snow was something of a problem, but we always swept it off the tent as soon as possible.

A camp of shelter tents was not handsome, even when they were set in company streets; they were so irregular in angle and in spread that they looked sprawly, for the space covered depended on the height of the forked sticks, some soldiers preferring a high tent and some a broad one. But on the whole the old soldier remembers his shelter tent kindly. It was

a simple invention but it did the army of the Potomac good service.

Benton says, "The thought of more permanent accommodation continually haunts, like a mirage, the soldier's life."

But such luxury was possible only when we were settled down for the winter, and even then was liable to be abandoned any moment on a signal to break camp and fall in. All we had at Fort Lyon was this cotton sheeting over us. On the march we usually put a rubber blanket under us, and if it was rainy, especially if water was running through the tent on the ground, we put branches underneath the rubber blanket, pine if we could get them.

For pillows we used our knapsacks. Toward the end of my enlistment I used to have a wooden frame inside my knapsack which kept it in shape and made a pillow four inches high and of definite shape. After I was discharged it was some weeks before I could sleep in a bed; I used to lie on the floor, with a dictionary for a pillow. I can quite appreciate the advantages of the little wooden stools the Japanese use. Even now I prefer a hair pillow stuffed hard and about four inches thick.

Wellington's bedroom at Apsley House was the plainest room in the mansion. The bed was the one he used on the field, and was hardly wide enough to turn in. He used to say, "When a man begins to turn in bed it is time to turn out." During the interval at Talavera he wrapped his cloak about him and went to sleep.

The old regiments did not take kindly to us recruits. They had hoped to go home to fill up, and were by no means pleased to have their recruits sent to them. The squad drills in the morning of the new men were made strenuous, and all sorts of tricks were played on them, not unlike those soph

35

omores play on freshmen. One recruit, for instance, when he had drawn his clothing from the quartermaster was persuaded to go back and demand his government umbrella.

Not that umbrellas were unprecedented. In 1813 during an action near Bayonne the Grenadier Guards protected themselves from rain by umbrellas, whereupon Wellington sent word that he would not allow them to make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the army.

But we recruits were certainly unwelcome. Two or three days before the battle of Reams station, the 20th Mass. received 200 German recruits who could not understand English.

Wellington declared that his Waterloo troops were the worst he ever commanded, and that if it had been composed of his old Peninsular troops the battle would have been decided in three hours.

A young officer drilling recruits gave the order, "Lift the left leg!" By mistake one of the recruits lifted his right leg so that it joined closely the left leg of his neighbor. "Good gracious!" exclaimed the astonished officer, "that fellow has lifted both his legs!"

They tell about a drill where the instructor grew angry at a recruit. "Now, Rafferty," he roared, "you're spoiling the line with those feet. Draw them back instantly and get them in line." Rafferty's dignity was hurt. ty's dignity was hurt. "Plaze, sargint," he said, "them's not mine: them's Micky Doolan's in the back row." On the other hand, when a sergeant called "About face!" all the feet turned except one pair. He seized the owner by the shoulder and shook him. "Why don't you turn with the rest?" he asked angrily. "Why I did, sir," the recruit replied. "You did? Why, I watched your feet and they never moved.”

"It's the boots they gave me, sir," explained the recruit: "they're so large that when I turn my feet turn in them."

An Irish recruit refused to answer to his name at roll-call because he and the sergeant were not on speaking terms.

A recruit being drilled in the bayonet asked, "How do you parry, sergeant?" "Parry be hanged," was the reply: "let the enemy do the parrying."

Lord Kitchener found a colonel drilling his men and declaring nothing was right. His men sat their horses wrong, moved awkwardly, and were no better than a damned rabble, a lot of gutter snipes. "That is not a way to address men," said Lord Kitchener. "They are not a damned rabble, but soldiers, and to be spoken to as such. No troops can be trained in that fashion, and the commander who does not respect his men is unworthy to lead them."

But Phillips was very good to me. He greeted me cordially, instructed me patiently in the ways of the camp, and did not assume superiority because he was a

veteran.

Sunday. Sept 7th. 1862.

Very pleasant. In the P. M. went down near Alexandria with Phillips and went in swimming. Rode part of the way back on an Artillery horse. Monday. John Tarbell came up to my tent and inquired if I knew him. I told him no. Whereupon he told me his name. He ran away from home five years ago and had not been heard of since. I was very glad to see him. He is in the 1st Conn. Heavy Artillery at Fort Ward.

In our boyish days, John and I had been nearly of an age, and exactly of a temperament. Many a jack-knife had we traded; many an apple-tree had we known by its fruits. But John had not been satisfied at home. His father was a plain farmer in

LIEUTENANT JOHN E. TARBELL

Wilton, N. H., who thought it better to have a hundred dollars in the pocket of a homespun suit, than to wear his money on his back. So John chafed and fretted in clothes that were a better protection from the cold than from the imagined sneers of his more stylish companions. Moreover, John was ambitious, and could not concentrate his energies upon hoeing potatoes and chopping stove-wood. His father did not understand him, and instead of encouraging and directing his ambition, sought to repress it, and punished him for surliness and obstinacy, till those faults actually appeared. The camel's back finally broke when John asked leave to attend a private school just started in the neighborhood, and in the end received, instead, a severe whipping. John concluded that he