Sketches of the campaign in northern Mexico : in eighteen hundred forty-six and seven / by an officer of the First Regiment of Ohio volunteers.

228 CAMP sCENEs.
istering the necessary reproof. At night, the camp often presented a scene quite as enchanting as any the imagination
could portray. The open and spacious parade-ground brightened by the mild radiance of an autumnal moon; the lofty
arches of the grove, adorned with waving banners of moss, and
illuminated by the ruddy glow of many fires; rows of tents,
luminous in the dim and shadowy vistas of the wood; the
silent sentinels pacing to and fro, their arms now flashing in
the light, now concealed in the shade; here a- group of cheerful young soldiers, whose bonyant spirits no vicissitudes can
dampen, laughing over the latest joke, or hatching some
harmless conspiracy against their comrades; there, seated
upon a fallen tree, their bronzed and bearded faces turned
toward the flames that curl and crackle around its green
stump, a party of elderly men smoking their pipes and conversing with the gravity of veterans, all combine to make up
a charming and interesting picture. Some of the Germans
belonging to the regiment were excellent vocalists, and not
unfrequently united their manly voices in the grand and
beautiful songs of their Fatherland; captivating every ear
with the wild melody of their choral symphonies. There
were those too, in the ranks who delighted in the Ethiopean
style of minstrelsy, long popular in the United States, and
who awoke the echoes of the grove with the untutored, but
not unpleasing, music of the banjo and the bones.
But our cainp-life at this period was not all coleur cle
rose. Sickness and pain were mingled with our pleasures;
and death, multiform as the clouds, flitted frequently across
the checkered scene. Though the mortality was not so