treets of St. Louis down to the levee, to embark on a transport
that was to take us to our destination. The city was enveloped in
that pall of coal smoke for which St. Louis is celebrated. It hung
heavy and low and set us all to coughing. I think the colonel must
have marched us down some by-street. It was narrow and dirty, with
high buildings on either side. The line officers took the
sidewalks, while the regiment, marching by the flank, tramped in
silence down the middle of the street, slumping through the nasty,
slimy mud. There was one thing very noticeable on this march
through St. Louis, and that was the utter lack of interest taken in
us by the inhabitants. From pictures I had seen in books at home,
my idea was that when soldiers departed for war, beautiful ladies
stood on balconies and waved snowy-white handkerchiefs at the
troops, while the men stood on the sidewalks and corners and swung
their hats and cheered.

There may have been regiments so favored, but ours was not one of
them. Occasionally a fat, chunky-looking fellow, of a German cast
of countenance, with a big pipe in his mouth, would stick his head
out of a door or window, look at us a few seconds, and then
disappear. No handkerchiefs nor hats were waved, we heard no
cheers. My thoughts at the time were that the Union people there
had all gone to war, or else the colonel was marching us through a
"Secesh" part of town.

We marched to the levee and from there on board the big sidewheel
steamer, Empress. The next evening she unfastened her moorings,
swung her head out into the river, turned down stream, and we were
off for the "seat of war." We arrived at Pittsburg Landing on March
31st. Pittsburg Landing, as its name indicates, was simply a
landing place for steamboats. It is on the west bank of the
Tennessee river, in a thickly wooded region about twenty miles
northeast of Corinth. There was no town there then, nothing but
"the log house on the hill" that the survivors of the battle of
Shiloh will all remember. The banks of the Tennessee on the
Pittsburg Landing side are steep and bluffy, rising about 100 feet
above the level of the river. Shiloh church, that gave the battle
its name, was a Methodist meeting house. It was a small, hewed log
building with a clapboard roof, about two miles out from the
lan