For weeks the regiment expected every day the order to march.  The guns had been distributed and all their fascinating secrets mastered.  In evolution and manual the men regarded themselves as quite equal to the regulars.  The strict orders forbidding absence overnight were hardly needed, as no one ventured far, fearing that the regiment would be whirled away to Washington during the night.  Had the men been older or more experienced in war, the weeks of waiting would have been delightful rather than dreary.  The regiment was the object of universal interest in the town.  Base-ball and the alluring outdoor pastimes that now divert the dawdlers of cities were unknown.  Hence the camp-ground of the Caribees was the matinee, ball-match, tennis, boating, all in one of the idle afternoon world of Warchester.  At parade and battalion drill the scene was like the race-ground on gala days.

All the fine equipages of the town drew up in the roads and lanes flanking the camp, where with leveled glasses the mothers, sisters, and sweethearts watched the columns as they skirmished, formed squares, or “passed the defile,” quite sure that the rebels would fly in confusion before such surprising manoeuvres.  This daily audience stimulated such a fierce rivalry among the companies that the men turned out at all hours of the day to drill and practice in squads, rather than loiter about the camp.  One day great news aroused the camp:  the Governor was to review the regiment and send it to the front.  All Warchester poured out to the Holly Hills, and when at five o’clock the companies filed out on the shining green there was such a cheer that the men felt repaid for the tiresome wait of months.  The civic commander-in-chief watched the movements with affable scrutiny, surrounded by a profusely uniformed staff, to whom he expressed the most politic approval.  He was heard to remark that no such soldiers had been seen on this continent since Scott had marched to Lundy’s Lane.

There was a throb of passionate joy in the ranks when this eulogium reached the men, for the words were hardly spoken when they were known in every company by that mysterious telegraphy which makes the human body a conductor swift as an electric wire among large masses of men.  Nor were the words less relished that the eulogist was as ignorant of military excellence as a Malay of the uses of a patent mower.  The men, it was easy to see, were much more efficient in movement than the officers in handling them.  Colonel Oswald had wasted weeks in the study of the occult evolutions of the battalion; they were still a maddening mystery to him that fatal day.  For six weeks his dreams had been haunted by airy battalions filing over impossible defiles.  The commands he gave that day would have thrown the companies into hopeless confusion had the junior officers not boldly substituted the right ones for the colonel’s blunders.  This, however, passed unnoted, for the crowds, and even the men, were not the sharp critics they afterward became when mistakes by an incompetent officer were saluted by shouts of ridicule, and the men contemptuously disregarded them.  When Colonel Oswald ordered them to “present arms” from a “place rest” there was more perplexity than merriment, and the admiring crowd saw nothing peculiar in one company snatching up bayonets to present while others remained perfectly still.