into execution a project I had for some time been meditating, which would require the exercise of all my faculties, and which would give me constant employment for mind and body, such as the routine of camp life did not afford, and which would compel me to concentrate my mind on the invention and execution of plans for the achievement of definite results for the cause of Southern independence.
Before entering upon the career of a soldier, I of course knew a great deal about military life, having been the wife of an army officer, and having resided at frontier stations, but I had nevertheless very crude and superficial notions about the exigencies of warfare. My ideas, however, were no cruder than those of thousands of others, for it is very doubtful whether any but a few veterans understood what would have to be gone through with by soldiers in the field, especially when large armies were operating against each other over an immense stretch of country.
The books I had read, in which the doings of heroes and heroines were recorded, devoted a large space to the description of battles, and these, as a matter of course, being more interesting and exciting than the other portions, it was only natural, perhaps, that the notion should become fixed in my mind that fighting was a soldier's chief, if not only employment.
Romance and Reality.
I was soon disillusioned on these points, and, after a very brief experience, discovered that actual warfare was far different from what I had supposed it would be. Neither of the battles in which I had thus far been engaged impressed me at all as I had expected they would, although, in some particulars, they were agreeable disappointments; for there was an exhilaration in an actual, hotly-contested fight that far surpassed anything my imagination had pictured. Battles, however, I found were likely to be few and far between, while there were thousands of disagreeable incidents connected with military life which I had never suspected, and of which my husband's warnings had scarcely given me the slightest hint. The inaction of the camp, when one is day after day hoping and half expecting something startling will happen, only to be subjected to perpetual disappointment, and the dull round of camp duties, and the trivial devices adopted to kill time, after a very brief period become most oppressive.
