It has been always full moon at our camp.  This night was full moon at its fullest,—­a night more perfect than all perfection, mild, dewy, refulgent.  At one o’clock the drum beat; we fell into ranks, and marched quietly off through the shadowy trees of the lane, into the highway.

ACROSS THE LONG BRIDGE.

I have heretofore been proud of my individuality, and resisted, so far as one may, all the world’s attempts to merge me in the mass. In pluribus unum has been my motto.  But whenever I march with the regiment, my pride is that I lose my individuality, that I am merged, that I become a part of a machine, a mere walking gentleman, a No. 1 or a No. 2, front rank or rear rank, file-leader or file-closer.  The machine is so steady and so mighty, it moves with such musical cadence and such brilliant show, that I enjoy it entirely as the unum and lose myself gladly as a pluribus.

Night increases this fascination.  The outer world is vague in the moonlight.  Objects out of our ranks are lost.  I see only glimmering steel and glittering buttons and the light-stepping forms of my comrades.  Our array and our step connect us.  We move as one man.  A man made up of a thousand members and each member a man is a grand creature,—­particularly when you consider that he is self-made.  And the object of this self-made giant, men-man, is to destroy another like himself, or the separate pigmy members of another such giant.  We have failed to put ourselves—­heads, arms, legs, and wills—­together as a unit for any purpose so thoroughly as to snuff out a similar unit.  Up to 1861, it seems that the business of war compacts men best.

Well, the Seventh, a compact projectile, was now flinging itself along the road to Washington.  Just a month ago, “in such a night as this,” we made our first promenade through the enemy’s country.  The moon of Annapolis,—­why should we not have our ominous moon, as those other fellows had their sun of Austerlitz?—­the moon of Annapolis shone over us.  No epithets are too fine or too complimentary for such a luminary, and there was no dust under her rays.

So we pegged along to Washington and across Washington,—­which at that point consists of Willard’s Hotel, few other buildings being in sight.  A hag in a nightcap reviewed us from an upper window as we tramped by.

Opposite that bald block, the Washington Monument, and opposite what was of more importance to us, a drove of beeves putting beef on their bones in the seedy grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, we were halted while the New Jersey brigade—­some three thousand of them—­trudged by, receiving the complimentary fire of our line as they passed.  New Jersey is not so far from New York but that the dialects of the two can understand each other.  Their respective slangs, though peculiar, are of the same genus.  By the end of this war, I trust that these distinctions of locality will be quite annulled.