alternating quick and droning notes of “the general” made us spring up from the mess-table one morning, and in a moment the lazy encampment was all hurry and bustle.  An aide leaped upon his horse at head-quarters and dashed off on the road to the river, and we saw that the servants of General Hazen, our brigade commander, were stripping his baggage of the small impedimenta which accumulate so rapidly even in a few days of rest, but are abandoned when the army starts on an active campaign.  It was not to be a mere change of camp, evidently, but a final adieu to the locality and a dash over the Tennessee—­if we could make it.

While some of us were yet sipping our hot coffee, saved out of the general wreck in packing up, the bugles called “the assembly,” and in ten minutes the brigade was stretching out at a lively rate on the road the aide had taken.  At the river was the detail of mechanics who had been at work on the scow in the bayou.  Their task had been suddenly abandoned.  It was useless:  the enemy had left the opposite bank and fallen back from Chattanooga.  The crossing was made, and the brigade struck out into the country toward Ringgold and the Georgia line.  We belonged to Palmer’s division of Crittenden’s corps, but we had no idea where our comrades were.  Passing over the uninviting country, and by the cornfields wasted by Bragg’s men that we might not gather the grain, the brigade fell in with the rest of its division near a lonely grist-mill at a junction of cross-roads, where a battalion of Southern cavalry had just galloped in upon an infantry regiment lying under its stacked arms by the wayside.  So the enemy was not entirely out of the country, it appeared.  Still, we saw nothing of him, save in a trifling skirmish the next day on the road from Ringgold to Gordon’s Mills.  Near this place, however, we fell in with General Thomas J. Wood, who had had a little encounter which convinced him that Bragg’s infantry was in force near by.  The gallant old soldier was in something of a passion because the theories of his superiors did not coincide with his demonstrations, and of course the demonstrations had to give way in that case.

Passing Gordon’s Mills, our division stretched away on the road toward La Fayette, and after a day’s march bivouacked in a wilderness of wood and on a sluggish stream different enough from the sparkling waters which came down by the old camp below Waldron’s Ridge.  McCook’s corps, they said, having crossed the Tennessee below Chattanooga and advanced southward on the western side of the Lookout range, was to come through a gap opposite our present position and join us.  Then the army, being together once more, and having gained Chattanooga by McCook’s flank movement, would return to that point.  To get Chattanooga was the object of the campaign, and the movements since we crossed the river were simply to assure the safe reunion of the several corps.