40 THE ARMY OP THE POTOMAC. serted. Except water and food, it supplied us with nothing. The soldiers, nmiccietmned either to long marches or to carry their ammunition, carried but two davs’ provisions. These exhausted, the wagons were their only resource. Then it was that we had to make what in America are called corduroy roads. These are made by cutting down trees of the same size, a few inches in diameter, and laying them side by side on the ground. All the infantry, not on duty at the advanced posts, were employed, working up to their knees in the mud and water, upon this Herculean labor, and they got through it wonderfully. Here the American pioneer was in his element; the mads were made as if by enchantment. The cannon and the wagons came in slowly indeed, but they came in where it seemed an impossibility they ever should do so. At night the troops could find no dr J corner for their bivouac. They had to sit down on the trunks of felled trees, or to construct with logs a sort of platform, on which they snatched a very precarious rest. I remember to have seen a general of division whose whole establishment consisted of five or six pine branches, one end stuck in the mud, or rather in the water, the other resting on a tree. Here he slept with an indianrubber cloak over his head. Marching along in this fashion, we reached the confederate lines, which opened on us at once with a sharp lire of artillery. AVc replied, but without making any impre-sion on the well-defined works which covered tin; hostile cannon. The creek had been reconnoitred and found impassable by infantry, both on account of the depth of water and of its marshy borders, in -which the troops would have been mired under a cross-lire of numbers of sharpshooters, concealed in the woods and behind the cm bankments. 'I hronghout the seven miles of the confedwtte lines we en- eonnt red the t me attitude of alert, defence. Everywhere cannon and camps. < )f course the inference was that we were
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