He left the service toward the close
of 1862.]
A very different character was Joshua W. Sill, who was sent to us as
ordnance officer. He too had been a regular army officer, but of the
younger class. Rather small and delicate in person, gentle and
refined in manner, he had about him little that answered to the
popular notion of a soldier. He had resigned from the army some
years before, and was a professor in an important educational
institution in Brooklyn, N. Y., when at the first act of hostility
he offered his services to the governor of Ohio, his native State.
After our day's work, we walked together along the railway,
discussing the political and military situation, and especially the
means of making most quickly an army out of the splendid but
untutored material that was collecting about us. Under his modest
and scholarly exterior I quickly discerned a fine temper in the
metal, that made his after career no enigma to me, and his heroic
death at the head of his division in the thickest of the strife at
Stone's River no surprise.
The two regiments which began the encampment were quickly followed
by others, and the arriving regiments sometimes had their first
taste of camp life under circumstances well calculated to dampen
their ardor.
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