MaineMilitia.com

The following is transcribed from 'Sixteenth Maine Regiment in the War of the Rebellion', by Major A. R. Small. This is a wonderful description of what a new recruit discovered about army life. And is lean's toward the comical side. A good read.

'Muster In.' Aug 14, 1862

"Boys of today may think it is fun to be a private soldier, but it isn't. The picturesque blue and scarlet uniform and jaunty laced cap, or symmetrical helmet, seen in cuts, are very deceptive; and the whole soldierly make-up of a picture is misleading.

The 'raw recruit' of '62 was suggestive of Falstaff's model private, and when foraging, a tramp.

Be a man never so much a man, his importance and conceit dwindles when he crawls into an unteasled shirt, pants too short and very baggy behind, coat too long at both ends, and a cap shapeless as a feed bag. And the brogans! weren't they just lovely, with sole six inches wide and heels like firkin covers.

The ideal picture of a soldier makes a veteran smile. He knows the knapsack, which is cut to fit in the engraving, is an unwieldy burden with its rough coarse contents of flannel and sole-leather and sometimes twenty rounds of ammunition extra. Mixed in with these regulation essentials, like beatitudes, are photographs, cards, 'housewife', Testament, pens, ink, paper, and oftentimes stolen truck enough to load a mule. All of this crowned with a double wool blanket and shelter tent rolled in a rubber blanket. One shoulder and hips support the 'commissary department'-an odorous haversack, which often stinks with its mixture of bacon, pork, salt-junk, sugar, coffee, tea, dessicated vegetables, rice, bits of yesterday's dinners, and old scraps husbanded with miserly care against a day of want sure to come.

Oh, the perfume of that haversack!

Loaded down in addition to the above, with canteen, full cartridge box, belt, cross belt, and musket, and start on a gunning tour wasn't fun. No, it wasn't.

A graduate of West Point in his nobby uniform is a thing of beauty, made to inspire a boy's admiration. His carriage is superb. His posing in the position of a soldier makes an unfledged aspirant for military honor green with envy. Under the most trying circumstances he preserves an immobile face. No amount of abuse or insult will cause him to forget himself. But the recruit in his baggy cantract suit, practicing 'eyes right,' is an object of both pity and ridicule. He has lost his identity, and all his claims to equality with even a fife-major are ignored. He finds it harder to hold his temper than to hold his little fingers on the seams of his trousers; hence, the first day's drill usually ends with solemn promises to 'lick seven or eight corporals and a lieutenant, when the war is over' - and a night in the guard tent for calling the drill-sergeant offensively arbitrary, and needlessly particular in rehearsing such d-d nonsensical gyrations.

A 'private' is anything but private. There is nothing about him that is respected as exclusive. The day that he is enlisted sees his whole person exposed to the critical eye of the surgeon-his lungs sounded, bowels manipulated, limbs bent, joints cracked, teeth examined, eyes tested, while he undergoes the closest scrutiny, in search of cutaneous eruptions and varicose veins.

After a few short months the lice claim close acquaintance, and the wood-ticks explore the second and third cuticle.

In camp his tent is ransacked. His knapsack opened every Sunday morning to the view of some inspector. His gun, equipments, and all there is on or about this private, is made conspicuously public. Although the United States Army Regulations guarantee him the exclusive privilege of keeping his opinion of officers and measures as his private property, he is tortured into expression, and then is published throughout the army as 'prejudicial to good order and military discipline,' and he gets into the guard-house.

There was no aristocracy among the 'privates'. They were thoroughly democratic.

A graduate from Harvard and an illiterate from the wilds of Maine were often seen affectionately picking lice together.

Polished scholars and ex-convicts, Christians and heathen bounty jumpers from the slums of New York, would cheat each other at 'seven-up.' All would bathe in and drink from the same stream, whether prior or subsequent to the watering of the brigade mules.

None of us had a gluttonous appetite for a scrimage, or a morbid desire to fill the last ditch; but when on the afternoon of August 17th, we were told the Sixteenth was ordered to the front, and must go on the 19th instant, cheer after cheer rent the air. Every order published called for cheers and 'tigers.'"

from 'Sixteenth Maine Regiment in the War of the Rebellion' (B. Thurston & Company, Portland, Maine, 1886)

by Major A. R. Small