Thoughts of an Average Girl

Journal of a Union Soldier

We have been engaged in this war for so long, the beat the boys play makes me sick. I can't stand it any longer, but I must. Day after day. The beat of the drum, the pop of the guns, all of it echoes in my head. It's all I hear. I can't see anything except blood, can't hear anything but the cries of the  wounded, no...dead men. We have to leave men daily, walk over them as they cry for home, for help, for mothers. How I long to help them. Yet we walk, run, and stomp over them. We've had to lay among them and use their bodies as barriers and shelters, steady our guns on them, and act as though nothing is wrong. The men we fight beside falling, dying, bodies flinching at every shot, and flying because of artillery shells. We get congratulations for small numbers of casualties, but it's not small. Lincoln doesn't know what he's talking about, he sees numbers, figures, and lines. He doesn't see fields covering bodies, smell death surrounding him, or fear being the next to fall injured and left for dead.
The rebel yell, though, is the worst sound in the world. It means that they are unafraid and so cannot be beat because even death doesn't faze them. They will give no quarter and attack relentlessly. It is also an awful noise because it means certain retreat or even death for the Union. Especially as we cannot fight a stone wall because everything bounces off of it.
We don't know the Southern grounds, the grounds of Virginia. The only way to win though is to get rid of the stone wall of Virginia. And the only way to destroy a wall is to take it down brick by brick, man by man. And so we continue........
I hate to admit it, but I'm scared. Scared for the men, scared for everyone...Even the South. They are our brothers, but we have to shoot to kill them anyway. If we don't, they'll kill us...