of the Shenandoah! Patterson is the burning reality
and McDowell the dream--and yet Johnston won't move to the westward and
attack! _Good Lord! we didn't come from home just to watch these
chestnuts get ripe! All the generals are crazy, anyhow._

It was nine, in the morning of Thursday the eighteenth,--a scorching
day. The locusts were singing of the heat; the grass, wherever men,
horses, and wagon wheels had not ground it into dust, was parched to a
golden brown; the mint by the stream looked wilted. The morning drill
was over, the 65th lounging beneath the trees. It was almost too hot to
fuss about Patterson, almost too hot to pity the sentinels, almost too
hot to wonder where Stuart's cavalry had gone that morning, and why "Old
Joe" quartered behind the mulberries in the brick farmhouse, had sent a
staff officer to "Old Jack," and why Bee's and Bartow's and Elzey's
brigades had been similarly visited; almost too hot to play checkers, to
whittle a set of chessmen, to finish that piece of Greek, to read
"Ivanhoe" and resolve to fight like Brian de Bois Gilbert and Richard
Coeur de Lion in one, to write home, to rout out knapsack and
haversack, and look again at fifty precious trifles; too hot to smoke,
to tease Company A's pet coon, to think about Thunder Run, to wonder how
pap was gettin' on with that thar piece of corn, and what the girls were
sayin'; too hot to borrow, too hot to swear, too hot to go down to the
creek and wash a shirt, too hot--"What's that drum beginning for? _The
long roll! The Army of the Valley is going to move! Boys, boys, boys! We
are going north to Charlestown! Boys, boys, boys! We are going to lick
Patterson!_"

At noon the Army of the Valley, the First Brigade leading, uncoiled
itself, regiment by regiment, from the wide meadow and the chestnut
wood, swept out upon the turnpike--and found its head turned toward the
south! There was stupefaction, then tongues were loosed. "What's
this--what's this, boys? Charlestown ain't in this direction. Old Joe's
lost his bearings! Johnny Lemon, you go tell him so--go ask Old Jack if
you can't. Whoa, there! The fool's going!! Come back here quick,
Johnny, afore the captain sees you! O hell! we're going right back
through Winchester!"

A wave of anger swept over the First Brigade. The 65th grew intractable,
moved at a snail's pace. The company officers went to and fro. "Close
up, men, close up! No, I don't know any more than you do--maybe it's
some rou