;l,—l '*1
THE NEW YORK SEVENTH MARCHING DOWN BROADWAY, APRIL 19, 1861.
pearanee as I deemed justly my due. I was taught my facings, and at the time I thought the drill-master needlessly fussy about shouldering, ordering, and presenting arms. At this time men were often drilled in company and regimental evolutions long before they learned the manual of arms, because of the difficulty of obtaining muskets. These we obtained at an early day, but we would willingly have resigned them after carrying them for a few hours. The musket, after an hour’s drill, seemed heavier and less ornamental than it had looked to be. The first day I went out to drill, getting tired of doing the same things over and over, I said to the drill-sergeant: “Let’s stop this fooling and go over to the grocery.” His only reply was addressed to a corporal: “ Corporal, take this man out and drill him like h—1”; and the corporal did! I found that suggestions were not so well appreciated in the army as in private life, and that no wisdom was equal to a drill-master’s “ Eight face,” “Left wheel,” and “Eight, oblique, march.” It takes a raw recruit some time to learn that he is not to think or suggest, but obey. Some never do learn. I acquired it at last, in humility and mud, but it was tough. Yet I doubt if my patriotism, during my first three weeks’ drill, was quite knee-high. Drilling looks easy to a spectator, but it is n’t. Old soldiers who read this will remember their green recruithood and smile assent. After a time I had cut down my ■uniform so that I could see out of it, and had conquered the drill sufficiently to see through it. Then the word came: On to Washington!
Onr company was quartered at a large hotel near the railway station in the town in which it had been recruited. Bunks had been fitted up within
that the “chances for travel” were no myth; but “promotion” was a little uncertain and slow.
I was in no hurry to open the door. Though determined to enlist, I was half inclined to put it off awhile; I had a fluctuation of desires ; I was fainthearted and brave; I wanted to enlist, and yet — Here I turned the knob, and was relieved. I had been more prompt, with all my hesitation, than the officer in his duty; he was n’t in. Finally he came, and said: “What do you want, my boy ? ” “I want to enlist,” I responded, blushing deeply with up-welling patriotism and bashfulness. Then the surgeon came to strip and examine me. In justice to myself, it must be stated that I signed the rolls without a tremor. It is common to the most of humanity, I believe, that, when confronted with actual danger, men have less fear than in its contemplation. I will, however, make one exception in favor of the first shell I heard uttering its bloodcurdling hisses, as though a steam locomotive were traveling the air. With this exception I have found the actual dangers of war always less terrible face to face than on the night before the battle.
My first uniform was a bad fit: my trousers were too long by three or four inches; the flannel shirt was coarse and unpleasant, too large at the neck and too short elsewhere. The forage cap was an ungainly bag with pasteboard top and leather visor; the blouse was the only part which seemed decent; while the overcoat made me feel like a little nubbin of corn in a large preponderance of husk. Nothing except “Virginia mud” ever took down my ideas of military pomp quite so low.
After enlisting I did not seem of so much consequence as I had expected. There was not so much excitement on account of my military ap-
20
A MILITIA UNIFORM OF ’61.
After tlie New York Seventh’s Memorial Statue in the Central Park.
THE NEW YORK SEVENTH AT CAMP CAMERON, WASHINGTON.
GOING TO THE FRONT.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE, BY WARREN LEE GOSS.
. . . It was the news that the 6th Massachusetts regiment had been mobbed by roughs on their passage through Baltimore which gave me the war fever. And yet when I read Governor John A. Andrew’s instructions to have the hero martyrs “preserved in ice and tenderly sent forward,” somehow, though I felt the pathos of it, I could not reconcile myself to the ice. Ice in connection with patriotism did not give me agreeable impressions of war, and when I came to think of it, the stoning of the heroic “ Sixth” didn’t suit me; it detracted from my desire to die a soldier’s death.
I lay awake all night thinking the matter over, with the “ice” and “brick-bats” before my mind. However, the fever culminated that night, and I resolved to enlist.
“ Cold chills ” ran up and down my back as I got out of bed after the sleepless night, and shaved preparatory to other desperate deeds of valor. I was twenty years of age, and when anything unusual was to be done, like fighting or courting, I shaved.
With a nervous tremor convulsing my system, and my heart thumping like muffled drum-beats, I stood before the door of the recruiting-office, and, before turning the knob to enter, read and re-read the advertisement for recruits posted thereon, until I knew all its peculiarities. The promised chances for “travel and promotion” seemed good, and I thought I might have made a mistake in considering war so serious after all. “ Chances for travel! ” I must confess now, after four years of soldiering,