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Q, equipped in light marching order, leaving knapsacks behind, moved out to where the half dozen wagons detailed from the regimental transportation were ready for the start. Each regiment in the brigade furnished a company and the same number of wagons. The impatient mules were braying and flapping their ears, as if they understood that they were to be the chief beneficiaries of the raid.
As we met these men we were greeted with statements, prophecy and advice. I remember hearing, "This is a tough one." "You'll catch hell, if you go in there!" "You'd better dump those knapsacks, you'll not want them at the front!" I had made up my mind to that effect, and was putting my hand back to unhook the knapsack strap when Isaac Plumb came up to me and asked what I was going to do.
On the gun-deck, where he found himself, it was impossible to stand upright and equally impossible to lie at length, every foot of room between the tiers of nine-pounders being occupied by kits, knapsacks, chests and mattresses littered about in all conceivable disorder, and the intervals between these bridged by the legs of his brothers-in-arms.
True, the yellow-green meadowlands ahead of us were scuffed and scored minutely as though a myriad swine had rooted there for mast. The gouges of wheels and feet were at the roadside. Under the broken hedge-rows you saw a littering of weather-beaten French knapsacks and mired uniform coats, but that was all.
I wish you to assault the enemy's works in this low ground on the right, in order to draw some of his forces away from the centre; our forces are having a hard time of it there. "Col. Anderson gave the order at once to prepare for action knapsacks and blankets were thrown off, and the assaulting column formed.
"Will you take up your knapsacks! if you don't I will report you." It was as if Maurice had been lashed with a whip across the face. Report them! that brute of a peasant would report those poor devils for easing their aching shoulders! And looking Jean defiantly in the face, he, too, in an impulse of blind rage, slipped the buckles and let his knapsack fall to the road.
We started at last, and the brave little horse rattled along at a gallant pace. “Hi, hi, hi!” shouted the Bohemian, and away we went along the well-beaten high-road, jolted unmercifully; our knapsacks dancing about our feet like living creatures.
The company was then marched out into a field, and all our knapsacks and pockets were searched, but even the little money that some must have had before was missing. The colonel did not mind being baffled so much as the major did, who told the colonel that if he left it in his hands he would endeavour to find the money, to which the colonel replied that he was just the man the Portuguese wanted.
The men were ordered to throw aside their knapsacks, and not to load their guns, "for there was no time there to load and fire," says General Hooker. The word was given about sunset, and the division charged headlong over the ground already covered with dead. A few words will convey the result. Of four thousand men who charged, seventeen hundred and sixty were left dead or wounded on the field.
Some of them, the most prominent and terrifying, probably still showed on their faces the theatrical cicatrices of their university duels. They were the soldiers who carried books in their knapsacks, and after the fusillade of a lot of country folk, or the sacking and burning of a hamlet, devoted themselves to reading the poets and philosophers by the glare of the blaze which they had kindled.
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