"We never fired a shot."

Saturday, December 17, 1864, back in the trenches.

It is cold. It is the sort of cold that freezes one's marrow in the bones. It has rained so much that we expect at any moment that our officers will direct us to find two of every living thing. Our daily pint of corn meal does not carry us through a day. And to add to our many woes, the worst one is that we did not find the Yankees.

They moved too fast and we moved to slow. The had time enough to destroy several miles of track and make their way back to their own works. We understand that some of our cavalry reached the readers and exchanged some fire. I suppose that our cavalry was supposed to hold the Yankees in place long enough for we poor infantry to come up and punish them. The Yankees managed to break away from the cavalry and escape fast enough to avoid their punishment.

On Sunday, the march was resumed at dawn. We followed the Yankees, anxious to get ahold of them. We had not gone but a few miles before we stopped. We needed the rest badly but did not want to lose the Yankees. After some time, we turned around and retraced our steps towards Petersburg. We were too late. The Yankees had outmarched us to the point of our not being able to catch them. We never fired a shot.

We could have caught them had we been able to move faster but our bellies would not allow our feet to do so. Too many of us dropped out of the line of march due to exhaustion and that due to lack of food. Had we been able to catch them, we would have been hard-pressed to whip them.

We went back through Jarrett's Station and slept on the cold ground at the Nottoway River. On Monday, we camped just shy of Dinwiddie Court House. It was all familiar. On Tuesday, we were back in our works. I do not know what happened after we entered our works as I fell asleep and I will wager that I was not alone. I do not remember eating anything or even having anything to eat.

We did not end this empty-handed. We did manage to capture some numbers of stragglers. They are now on their way to a prisoner-of-war camp. I noticed that some were bare-footed and that probably not from wearing out their brogans while destroying the railroad. For some reason, we came across a number of blankets abandoned by the Yankees. Some of us, myself not among them, are sleeping warner of late.

In other times, when we took the field from the Yankees, we could count upon a bounty of abandoned property, haversacks with cheese and sardines, knapsacks withdrawers and socks, muskets and cartridge boxes enough to re-equip an army, Lee's army. This time, there were only some blankets and tents. This time they retreated, it was orderly and not in a panic. They are getting better at the art of war.


I Send You These Few Lines


Grant's raiders were Warren's corps, reinforced. They did tear up some sixteen miles of track in the usual way. First, the rails were taken up. The ties were removed, piled up and set on fire with the rails on top. As the rails heated, they became soft and were wrapped around trees. In the west, these were called, "Sherman's Neckties."

While the Weldon Railroad was disrupted, it was not destroyed. Confederate supply trains transferred their cargos to wagons at one end of the break. The wagons would bypass the break and reload waiting trains on the other side. The flow of supplies to Lee's army was slowed but not stopped. The damage dome was eventually repaired.

Rails damaged as described above could be repaired. It would be very slow and labor-intensive, beating the rails back into usable condition but it could be done. To destroy the rails beyond their being reused, there was a device that would allow the rails to be not just bent but twisted. A twisted rail was beyond the ability of Southern industry to be made good again.

The Union raiders did outmarch Hill's infantry. The cold affected both sides but the lack of food hurt only the Confederates. The abandoned blankets and tents comes from Theodore Garrish of the 189th New York, "Falling in, our few remaining blankets and tents proved to be so frozen, wet and heavy, the men were generally compelled to abandon them."