After joining the regiment, we only advanced a little further and halted for the night, sleeping with guns in arms, lest a night attack might find the troops illy prepared were the guns in stack.  We were so near the enemy that fires were not allowed, and none permitted to speak above a whisper.  Two men from each company were detailed to go to the rear and cook rations.  It is not an easy task for two men, who had been marching and fighting all day, to be up all night cooking three meals each for thirty or forty men, having to gather their own fuel, and often going half mile for water.  A whole day’s ration is always cooked at one time on marches, as night is the only time for cooking.  The decrees of an order for a detail are inexorable.  A soldier must take it as it comes, for none ever know but what the next duties may be even worse than the present.  As a general rule, soldiers rarely ever grumble at any detail on the eve of an engagement, for sometimes it excuses them from a battle, and the old experienced veteran never refuses that.

At daylight a battery some two hundred yards in our front opened a furious fire upon us, the shells coming uncomfortably near our heads.  If there were any infantry between the battery and our troops, they must have laid low to escape the shots over their heads.  But after a few rounds they limbered up and scampered away.  We moved slowly along with heavy skirmishing in our front all the morning of the second.  When near the Chancellor’s House, we formed line of battle in a kind of semi-circle, our right resting on the river and extending over the plank road, Kershaw being some distance to the left of this road, the Fifteenth Regiment occupying the right.  Here we remained for the remainder of the day.  We heard the word coming up the line, “No cheering, no cheering.”  In a few moments General Lee came riding along the lines, going to the left.  He had with him quite a number of his staff and one or two couriers.  He looked straight to the front and thoughtful, noticing none of the soldiers who rushed to the line to see him pass.  He no doubt was then forming the masterful move, and one, too, in opposition to all rules or order of military science or strategy, “the division of his army in the face of the enemy,” a movement that has caused many armies, before, destruction and the downfall of its commander.  But nothing succeeds like success.  The great disparity in numbers was so great that Lee could only watch and hope for some mistake or blunder of his adversary, or by some extraordinary strategic manoeuver on his own part, gain the advantage by which his opponent would be ruined.  Hooker had one hundred and thirty thousand men, while Lee had only sixty thousand.  With this number it seemed an easy task for Hooker to threaten Lee at Fredericksburg, then fall upon him with his entire force at Chancellorsville and crush him before Lee could extricate himself from the meshes that were surrounding him, and retreat to