11:50 PM, JULY 2,1863 NEAR TANEYTOWN

John Williamson sat down on the cool, damp ground with a stifled groan, leaning back against the trunk of an ancient oak. The campfires around

him were beginning to flicker down. The men had been given a few hours to cook a hurried dinner, a short rest, and then orders to be ready to march long before dawn.

Hazner was by his side, curled up on the bare ground, a tattered quilt his blanket, haversack a pillow. He was snoring away contentedly, and John envied him his oblivion.

The march had been grueling, John and Hazner assigned to the rear of the regimental column to prod the men along, and when necessary to sign off permission for men too exhausted, or sick, to fall out of the line of march. Between yesterday's battle and the stragglers, the regiment was down to less than half of what it had been only three days ago.

He tried to close his eyes, to sleep as Hazner did, but couldn't Finally he reached into his haversack and pulled out a small leather-bound volume. Elizabeth had given it to him on the day he left for the war, and the mere touch of it made him smile, remembering how she had kissed the book before handing it to him, asking him to write often, that it would be the way in which they could still touch each other. She had fancied him to be a writer, and the thought of it made him smile. She who loved Scott Hugo, and Dickens fancied that perhaps he would become such as well.

He opened the volume up and skimmed through it The first months of his journal were filled with pages of neatly written notes, vignettes when the world still seemed so young and innocent… a snowfall in camp and how the boys from the hot bottomlands of Carolina had frolicked… the first shock of battle before Richmond… the strange night after Fredericksburg when the Northern Lights appeared*-a sign of the Norse gods gathering in the souls of the slain- and then long weeks of nothing, just blank pages.

He fumbled for a pencil in his haversack and rested the volume in his lap, looking off across the fields, the shadows of men covering the ground, the warm, pleasant smell of wood smoke and coffee, so reminiscent of a world of long ago.

"My dearest Elizabeth," he wrote, hesitated, then scratched me line out No, this is just for myself..

"I am in Maryland tonight" he began again, now writing for himself. "At least I think that is where we are. It gets confusing at times with all the marching. A long one today, twenty miles or more. Tomorrow there will be another fight; if not tomorrow, then the day after.

"Why I am here I can no longer say with any certainty. There was a time, long ago, when I believed, but in what I can no longer say. All I long for is for this to end, to go home, and to somehow leave behind all that I have seen, to forget all that I have felt I feel a shadow walking beside me, filling my nights with coldness. If I live, perhaps there will be a day when we will speak of these times with pride, but will I be there? And if not what will be then said of me? What will you say, Elizabeth, if I do not return? Will you remember me? Will you wait for me across the long years of your life, or will memory fade and one day you will seek warmth, seek love with another?"

He stopped for a moment pencil raised, ready to scratch out the last line. What if I die, and she reads that?

No, let her. Fine for others to hide their fears with noble sentiments, but this is my life, the only one I shall ever have. There is no romance in this agony, and those who speak of glory rarely have seen the truth of it

He looked back down at the page.

"I wish I could fool myself into believing that what I do matters," he wrote. "But does it? Why did this war have to come into my life? Why now? Elizabeth, I would trade, in ah instant, all of this for just a day, a night as it once was, as it should have been for us. I care not for what others speak of, of all the things we now say caused this war. I just long to go home… but I cannot… and I fear I never will.

"I just want to live. If I should survive this, all I ask is for you to stay by my side, for us to grow old together in peace."

"Writing in that book again, sir?"

John nervously looked up. It was Hazner, half sitting up, looking over at him. John hurriedly closed the book.

"Yeah."

"Ruin your eyes, John, writing by moonlight" John laughed shyly but said nothing.

'Writing to her?" 'Wot really."

"Why don't you get some rest, Major. We're goin' to need it come morning."

"Can't get to sleep." George sat up, stretched, and looked around. "Everything – quiet?" "Yup."

"John, you shouldn't think so much." "Can't help it"

"Like I always said, if your name's on the bullet, your name's on the bullet Nothing can change that" "Wish I had your Presbyterian view of life." 'What? You know I'm Baptist." John laughed softly and shook his head. George grinned softly.

"Do you think we'll ever get home?" John asked, and then instantly regretted the question. Though they had been friends since childhood, still, out here the social division between officer and sergeant should have stopped him from ever asking that And yet, though surrounded by these thousands of men, never had he felt so lonely and haunted.

"I guess most soldiers wonder that," George offered. "Even them fellas that marched with Pharoah against Moses, as you read about in the Bible. Just before they got to the Red Sea, I bet one of them asked the man next to him, "

'Hey, think we'll get home for dinner tonight after killing that Moses?"

George laughed softly at his own joke. "Worrying ain't gonna change it"

John said nothing, but he could not help but wonder, were they indeed like Pharoah's army? Was God, and dare he think it, if there is a God, does He stand against us or with us. John stuffed the book back into his haversack and slid down, resting his head against a root of the oak tree.

"Something changed today. I could've sworn we'd go straight into that town," John whispered. "I wonder about that How a general looks at a map, ponders on it, then says,

'No, let us go here rather than there.' You could sense that from Walter Taylor. I wonder if that means that you and I will now live, or…" His question trailed off.

"We're here, John. Just let it go at that You did good yesterday. I heard the men talking about it"

'About what?"

"How you led that charge. They believe in you." "Do your

George chuckled. "Course J do; otherwise I wouldn't scrounge up coffee and borrow money from you. Of course I do. Just that you think too much at times."

John was silent for a moment "George, if something does happen to me."

‘I know," George whispered, "but it won't. I got a feeling

for these things. You'll go home when this is done. Be a judge like your poppa, maybe even a congressman someday, and have lots of children."

John looked at the cold, uncaring heavens. To think of that dream was too painful to bear, and he pushed it away. He wanted to say more, but a moment later he heard Hazner snoring. His friend had drifted back off*.

Alone, John looked at the low-hanging moon as it crossed the midnight sky.