alternating quick and droning notes of "the general" made
us spring up from the mess-table one morning, and in a moment the lazy
encampment was all hurry and bustle. An aide leaped upon his horse at
head-quarters and dashed off on the road to the river, and we saw that
the servants of General Hazen, our brigade commander, were stripping his
baggage of the small impedimenta which accumulate so rapidly even in a
few days of rest, but are abandoned when the army starts on an active
campaign. It was not to be a mere change of camp, evidently, but a final
adieu to the locality and a dash over the Tennessee--if we could make
it.

While some of us were yet sipping our hot coffee, saved out of the
general wreck in packing up, the bugles called "the assembly," and in
ten minutes the brigade was stretching out at a lively rate on the road
the aide had taken. At the river was the detail of mechanics who had
been at work on the scow in the bayou. Their task had been suddenly
abandoned. It was useless: the enemy had left the opposite bank and
fallen back from Chattanooga. The crossing was made, and the brigade
struck out into the country toward Ringgold and the Georgia line. We
belonged to Palmer's division of Crittenden's corps, but we had no idea
where our comrades were. Passing over the uninviting country, and by the
cornfields wasted by Bragg's men that we might not gather the grain, the
brigade fell in with the rest of its division near a lonely grist-mill
at a junction of cross-roads, where a battalion of Southern cavalry had
just galloped in upon an infantry regiment lying under its stacked arms
by the wayside. So the enemy was not entirely out of the country, it
appeared. Still, we saw nothing of him, save in a trifling skirmish the
next day on the road from Ringgold to Gordon's Mills. Near this place,
however, we fell in with General Thomas J. Wood, who had had a little
encounter which convinced him that Bragg's infantry was in force near
by. The gallant old soldier was in something of a passion because the
theories of his superiors did not coincide with his demonstrations, and
of course the demonstrations had to give way in that case.

Passing Gordon's Mills, our division stretched away on the road toward
La Fayette, and after a day's march bivouacked in a wilderness of wood
and on a sluggish stream different enough from the sparkling waters
which came down by the old camp below Waldron's Ridge. McCook's corps,
they said,