In Other Respects They
Appeared To Be In Good Order.
It must be understood that these
soldiers, the volunteers, had never been made subject to any
discipline as to cleanliness.
They wore their hair long. Their
hats or caps, though all made in some military form and with some
military appendance, were various and ill assorted. They all were
covered with loose, thick, blue-gray great-coats, which no doubt
were warm and wholesome, but which from their looseness and color
seemed to be peculiarly susceptible of receiving and showing a very
large amount of mud. Their boots were always good; but each man was
shod as he liked. Many wore heavy overboots coming up the leg -
boots of excellent manufacture, and from their cost, if for no other
reason, quite out of the reach of an English soldier - boots in which
a man would be not at all unfortunate to find himself hunting; but
from these, or from their high-lows, shoes, or whatever they might
wear, the mud had never been even scraped. These men were all
warmly clothed, but clothed apparently with an endeavor to contract
as much mud as might be possible.
The generals and commodores were gone up the Ohio River and up the
Tennessee in an expedition with gunboats, which turned out to be
successful, and of which we have all read in the daily history of
this war. They had departed the day before our arrival; and though
we still found at Cairo a squadron of gun-boats - if gun-boats go in
squadrons - the bulk of the army had been moved.
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