the oats that I had cradled, I obeyed this "stern daughter of
the voice of God"--to use Wordsworth's phrase--and turned my face to the
South. I joined my old comrades of the Spring Green Guards in the 6th
Wisconsin Battery, nine months or so after their first enlistment.

I was a "mother's boy", and with the exception of three months'
district schooling at an aunt's house in Watertown, when a little lad,
had never been away from home over night. I had not then and have not
since, owned a firearm of any description. As I approach my
three-score-and-ten, I can say that I have never sighted a gun, or
pulled the trigger on anything smaller than a cannon, and that only when
ordered.

It seems necessary for me to state further, that throughout the three
years of camp life, as through all the succeeding years, I have been a
total abstainer from all forms of liquor and tobacco. The strictures
throughout the Diary concerning the over-use of intoxicants were written
from this standpoint, and perhaps were over stated. At least truth
requires that I should at this distance testify that the bulk of the
Union Army, so largely made up of boys, was of stern stuff, with their
lives rooted in seriousness and committed to sobriety, as the subsequent
careers of those who were allowed to return amply prove. Many things set
forth in this Diary were necessarily untrue to fact, but there is
nothing but what was true to the thought and feeling of the writer at
the time. The simplicity of the narrative and the lapse of time, will, I
hope, take all the barbs out of any random shafts that may have been
fired by a battery boy.

The monotonous story of this battery boy is told in long metre in the
Diary here published. The only remarkable thing about the record is,
that it exists and is still available fifty years after the writing. Of
course every soldier lad started to keep a diary. Very few persisted to
the end; rare is the private who did not outlast his own diary. And then
again, the vicissitudes of the camp, the hopeless carelessness of the
American people to contemporary history, have carried to oblivion most
of such records. These ten little memorandum books would doubtless have
suffered a like fate, were it not for the vigilance of the home folk, to
whose care the successive volumes were promptly consigned. And then many
years after, there was the loving, unsolicited persistency of a
faithful amanuensis, who, unbeknown to me, in the "cra