The whole matter impressed me queerly. The only artillery I had ever
seen in action were field pieces. They made an earsplitting crash when
they were discharged, and there was likely to be oceans of trouble for
everybody in that neighborhood about that time. I reasoned from this
that bigger guns made a proportionally greater amount of noise, and bred
an infinitely larger quantity of trouble. Now I was hearing the giants
of the world's ordnance, and they were not so impressive as a lively
battery of three-inch rifles. Their reports did not threaten to shatter
everything, but had a dull resonance, something like that produced by
striking an empty barrel with a wooden maul. Their shells did not come
at one in that wildly, ferocious way, with which a missile from a
six-pounder convinces every fellow in a long line of battle that he is
the identical one it is meant for, but they meandered over in a lazy,
leisurely manner, as if time was no object and no person would feel put
out at having to wait for them. Then, the idea of firing every quarter
of an hour for a year--fixing up a job for a lifetime, as Andrews
expressed it,--and of being fired back at for an hour at 9 o'clock every
morning and evening; of fifty thousand people going on buying and
selling, eating, drinking and sleeping, having dances, drives and balls,
marrying and giving in marriage, all within a few hundred yards of where
the shells were falling-struck me as a most singular method of
conducting warfare.

We received no rations until the day after our arrival, and then they
were scanty, though fair in quality. We were by this time so hungry and
faint that we could hardly move. We did nothing for hours but lie around
on the ground and try to forget how famished we were. At the
announcement of rations, many acted as if crazy, and it was all that the
Sergeants could do to restrain the impatient mob from tearing the food
away and devouring it, when they were trying to divide it out. Very