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Updated: May 18, 2025
Afraid of shadows, they submit tamely to squads of dragoons, and permit them, without a murmur, to burn their cotton, take their horses, corn, and every thing; and, when we reach them, they are full of complaints if our men take a few fence-rails for fire, or corn to feed our horses.
D'ye ever see an old cedar fence-rail, one that had been chumped out with a blunt axe, and had laid out in the sun and the wind and the snow and the rain till 'twas warped this way, and shrunk that way, and twisted every way? Wal! Simon's wife looks as if she had swallowed one o' them fence-rails, and shrunk to it! Dear, dear! how I laughed. And 'twas true, my dear!
All I got by looking then was a mellow laugh from behind her relowered veil; but we were going at a swift trot, nearing a roadside fire of fence-rails left by some belated foraging team, and as she came into the glare of it I turned my eyes a second time.
All the men were at work corduroying the roads, using fence-rails and split saplings, and every foot of the way had thus to be corduroyed to enable the artillery and wagons to pass.
There had been no attempt at cultivation of this broad expanse; wild oats, mustard, and rank grasses left it a tossing sea of turbulent and variegated color whose waves rode high enough to engulf horse and rider in their choking depths. Even the traces of human struggle, the uprooted stakes, scattered fence-rails, and empty post-holes were forever hidden under these billows of verdure.
Getty's division, when I found it, was about a mile north of Middletown, posted on the reverse slope of some slightly rising ground, holding a barricade made with fence-rails, and skirmishing slightly with the enemy's pickets.
They cheered the objects as they floated by, and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men who caught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs at the points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shore and stretched far out over the flood.
They seemed mere youths, and I thought sadly of the mothers, whose hearts would throb with equal anguish in a Northern and a Southern home. In a corner of the field, supported by a pile of broken fence-rails, a soldier sat apparently beckoning to us. On approaching him we discovered that he was quite dead, although he sat upright, with open eyes and extended arm.
We were compelled at places to gather fence-rails, and to land wagons and haul wood from the interior to the boats; but I reached Memphis during the night of the 2d of October, and the other boats came in on the 3d and 4th.
If it was not our duty to stand up, we would like nothing better than to sink down in the shade and go to sleep; but we must attend to our task and keep awake." "What can you have, you wee things, to keep you busy?" asked the tall milkweed that grew near the fence-rails; and the mullein-stalk beside it echoed, "What, indeed?"
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