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BEING THE NARRATIVE OF BATTERY A OF THE 101st FIELD ARTILLERY

Page 14

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soon learned how to put on the harness, how to At the saddle, and how to cinch it up so that it would not slide off every few minutes. Experience was a wonderful teacher. On the first few "turnouts," teams were constantly stopping and dropping out because a cinch had come undone, a trace had unhooked itself, a bit had fallen out of a horse's mouth, or a dozen other equally insuperable difficulties had cropped up. But the drivers quickly found out how to solve their troubles; how to fasten a cinch so it would stay fastened; how to hook a trace so it would stay hooked; or how to put on a blanket so it would stay put. The number of things that were necessary to know before one became even a fair artilleryman seemed extraordinary. When an outsider would see an artillery hitch driving along, it would look to him as if nothing could be simpler; so most of the recruits had thought before they joined; it only took them one short "turnout," however, to convince them of their mistake. The art of driving, of harnessing, of feeding, of grooming, of pitching and breaking camp, of stretching picket lines, of limbering and unlimbering the guns or caissons, and of innumerable other details was not so easy as it appeared. Little points like put­ ting on a nose bag when the horse was very hungry, or cleaning out his hind feet when he did not want them to be cleaned out, or straightening out a six horse hitch when a couple of horses fell down and got tangled up in the traces, required no little knack. And so it went. The mysteries of the army were gradually revealed. Each Sunday night, the men, more dirty and tired than they had probably ever

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CONTENTS
INDEX