150th Shiloh… Saturday AM….. As usua
150th Shiloh… Saturday AM…..
As usual I slept about 3 hours before I woke up. Since I never carry any modern conveniences, I had no wrist watch to check the time. I also never wear my wedding ring because it will scar the wood on my rifle and there might be a chance of losing it. So I just started the process of turning first to lay on my left side then my right in the fetal position. This gets stress off my back and I can dose for a while before I have to switch positions. After about two days of sleeping like this the outside of my hips are sore to the touch.
Anyway I dozed off and on for about 5 hours. The sky started to lighten up and pretty soon some idiot with a bugle sounded Reveille, which brought a lot of grousing from our camp. We all began asking what time it was and one of our unit had a pocket watch and said it was 5:30. At that announcement we all got up and ate what breakfast we had left in our haversacks. I pulled out some beef jerky and rolled a tortilla for my morning nourishment. Once finished I pulled Grandpa, my musket, out of the folds of my gum blanket to see if there was much rust on it. It had faired the night well. There was a minimum of rust on the barrel and rammer. So I was set for the morning battle, since I had cleaned the musket yesterday afternoon once I had returned from the Tactical and got situated in our camp.
We got a First Call from First Sergeant Randy and cootered up. We fell in line to hear roll call and then filed out near the road that ran by our camp to get into Battalion line. We were the third company out of a four company Battalion, which meant that the colors, our flag, were next to our First Sergeant. This position placed the colors at the front of our line and at the end of the second company line. Once we were all in Battalion, our commander, Lt. Col. Toren Blanco ordered ‘Fix Bayonets’. So we attached our bayonets to our muskets. He then ordered ‘Stack Arms’. We four that were at the end of the line accomplished this feat and had a good stack out in front of the battle line that looked first rate. We were then ordered to ‘Rest’, which means we can stay in the area, but don’t take off for parts unknown.
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