OFF SHORE, ALEXANDRIA. 23d.—­Here we anchored last night after the main detachment was landed, and the Vermont and Massachusetts men remained on board another night.  We hear we are to go right to the field, where active operations are going on.  This seems hard.  We have not till now given up the hope that we were not to go out into Virginia with the rest of the men, but were to be kept here at Washington.  Fierce, indeed, are our trials.  I am not discouraged entirely; but I am weak from want of food which I can eat, and from sickness.  I do not know how I am going to live in such way, or get to the front.

P.S.  We have just landed; and I had the liberty to buy a pie of a woman hawking such things, that has strengthened me wonderfully.

CAMP NEAR CULPEPER. 25th.—­My distress is too great for words; but I must overcome my disinclination to write, or this record will remain unfinished.  So, with aching head and heart, I proceed.

Yesterday morning we were roused early for breakfast and for preparation for starting.  After marching out of the barracks, we were first taken to the armory, where each man received a gun and its equipments and a piece of tent.  We stood in line, waiting for our turn with apprehensions of coming trouble.  Though we had felt free to keep with those among whom we had been placed, we could not consent to carry a gun, even though we did not intend to use it; and, from our previous experience, we knew it would go harder with us, if we took the first step in the wrong direction, though it might seem an unimportant one, and an easy and not very wrong way to avoid difficulty.  So we felt decided we must decline receiving the guns.  In the hurry and bustle of equipping a detachment of soldiers, one attempting to explain a position and the grounds therefor so peculiar as ours to junior, petty officers, possessing liberally the characteristics of these:  pride, vanity, conceit, and an arbitrary spirit, impatience, profanity, and contempt for holy things, must needs find the opportunity a very unfavourable one.

We succeeded in giving these young officers a slight idea of what we were; and endeavoured to answer their questions of why we did not pay our commutation, and avail ourselves of that provision made expressly for such; of why we had come as far as that place, etc.  We realized then the unpleasant results of that practice, that had been employed with us by the successive officers into whose hands we had fallen,—­of shirking any responsibility, and of passing us on to the next officer above.

A council was soon holden to decide what to do with us.  One proposed to place us under arrest, a sentiment we rather hoped might prevail, as it might prevent our being sent on to the front; but another, in some spite and impatience, insisted, as it was their duty to supply a gun to every man and forward him, that the guns should be put upon us, and we be made to carry them.  Accordingly the equipment