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Updated: June 26, 2025
The guns, the pickets of horses, the tents, the camp-fires, and the soldiers in their shirt-sleeves, have a picturesque effect under the great trees. On the Place de la Concorde from morning to evening there is a mob discussing things in general, and watching the regiments as they defile with their crowns before the statue of Strasburg.
The rank to which you have risen while yet so young shows that you are of good family, so you can imagine how highly we esteem the honor of seeing your men trampling, destroying, and burning in their camp-fires everything which years of labor and care had produced to make our little garden a thing of beauty.
By three o'clock in the morning the storm was over and the stars began to peep forth from behind the clouds. As tired as they were the cadets had to set to work to put up the tents and arrange their cots as best they could. Camp-fires were lit in half a dozen places and the students huddled around these to dry themselves and get warm. "I guess this is a touch of real army life," said Dick.
The reserves were around their camp-fires making savoury stews for the evening meal. They would sleep where night found them on the sward under the stars, as in wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of many while the army was yet mobile, before the contest became one of the mole and the beaver.
At night the camp-fires of the Confederates, who were assembling in force, could be seen on the southern bank of the Potomac, and it was not uncommon to meet on Pennsylvania Avenue a defiant Southerner openly wearing a large Virginia or South Carolina secession badge.
Those who saw or heard passed on the signal and hurried toward the wood, where others had already arranged rude shelters and gathered piles of dry wood for fuel. Around the several camp-fires the hunters sat or stood, while slices of savory meat were broiled and eaten with a relish by the half-starved men. But the storm had now fairly enveloped them in whirling whiteness.
"Ah, master, master, you will find the people will be too much for you, and that you will have to return. The Wa-manyara are bad, the Wakonongo are very bad, the Wazavira are the worst of all. You have come to this country at a bad time. It is war everywhere." And, indeed, judging from the tenor of the conversations around our camp-fires, it seemed but too evident.
We did not wish to strain it." They made their camp-fires on the borders of the lake, and one evening it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fences and habitation. In a letter home he describes this fire in a fine, vivid way.
Great oblong booths of blue indigo sheeting show where the temporary stables for the horses are being erected; and at night the glittering of innumerable camp-fires betokens the presence of a whole army of grooms, grass-cutters, peons, watchmen, and other servants cooking their evening meal of rice, and discussing the chances of the horses of their respective masters in the approaching races.
Our lines, so carefully and painfully built up during those long never-ending weeks, had crumbled to pieces in half as many hours. The barricades and trenches obstructing the streets had been thrown all in a lump and sent to join the huge litter which surrounded them. There was hardly a sentry or a picquet to be seen, only a hundred of little camp-fires twinkling and twinkling everywhere.
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