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Updated: May 6, 2025
Those with him, more intent on getting something to eat, had pushed on back to where their haversacks and canteens and blankets had been left. Presently Shorty heard a call across the little valley: "Cor po ral Ell iott. Cor po ral Ell iott!" "Well, what is it?" Shorty called back, crustily. "Lit tle Pete and Sandy Ba ker is o ver here," came back upon the bright Spring air.
As we passed the occasional little hacienda, set in its grove of cocoanut palms or orange-trees, dusky and wrinkled women came forth from the doors, bearing upon their heads huge jars, from which we filled our ever-parched canteens with cool, sweet water. They also brought us mangoes and other native fruits, and queer cigars of most abominable flavor.
From there we marched to the depot, and with the 43rd Illinois of our brigade got on the cars, and were soon being whirled over the road in a northerly direction. It was a warm, sunshiny day, and we common soldiers supposed we were going on just some little temporary scout, so we encumbered ourselves with nothing but our arms, and haversacks, and canteens.
When at home his mother had aroused him for the early labour of his life on the farm, it had often been his fashion to be irritable, childish, diabolical; and his mother had died since he had come to the war. He saw that, in this matter of the well, the canteens, the shells, he was an intruder in the land of fine deeds. He was now about thirty paces from his comrades.
In the matter of luxuries we were modest we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners. By eight o'clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river.
But there was none to give, the canteens were-empty. "Boys," exclaimed Nathan Cunningham, a lad of eighteen, the color-bearer for his regiment, "I can't stand this any more. They want water, and water they must have. So let me have a few canteens and I'll go for some."
It narrowed as it descended; it was for that reason the enemy had selected that part of it for the attack, and the vines and bushes interlaced so closely above it that the sun could not come through. The rocks on either side were spattered with blood and the rank grass was matted with it. Blanket rolls, haversacks, carbines, and canteens had been abandoned all along its length.
Coming through a Canadian-looking pine forest, with log-house barracks, kitchens, and canteens beneath one such peak, I was reminded of Dante's lines: 'Gazing above, I saw her shoulders, clothed already with the planet's rays. But poetic memories soon faded before a sniper's bullet from a very near Austrian outlook.
The second guard, under Flood, pushed the cattle off their beds an hour before dawn, and before they were relieved had urged the herd more than five miles on the third day's drive over this waterless mesa. In spite of our economy of water, after breakfast on this third morning there was scarcely enough left to fill the canteens for the day.
Profound silence now prevailed in the ranks, broken only by the rattle of canteens against the shanks of the bayonets, and the heavy, monotonous tramp of the men. As Walter Scott has said somewhere in one of his poetical works: "No cymbal clashed, no clarion rang, Still were the pipe and drum; Save heavy tread and armor's clang, The sullen march was dumb."
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