The failure at Fredericksburg, considered in itself, and especially in connection with its causes, was well calculated to produce much discouragement throughout the entire army. On the eleventh of December the troops streamed forth from their camps, confident in their ability to drive the foe from Marye’s Heights, and hurl him back to Richmond. On the sixteenth they returned, baffled and dispirited, having lost twelve thousand men in fruitless efforts to overcome the natural and artificial advantages of the rebel position. The fearful scenes of a battle may well impress the veteran of many conflicts; but when, for the first time, a regiment meets the enemy with every advantage in favor of the latter, and when the list of killed and wounded swells to unusual proportions, and nothing is accomplished by this expense of life and energy, it is no sign of weakness that despondency and gloom for a time prevail. Such a feeling, resulting from failure in the campaign, and from the loss of a large number of our most esteemed officers and men, pervaded the Twenty-seventh in common with the rest of the army. The loss of such men as Captains Schweizer and Taylor, Sergeants Barrett and Fowler,
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 Corporals Mimmac and Alling, and many others, men of high character, who went to the field purely from a sense of duty—such men in their death could not fail to leave behind, among their fellow soldiers, a universal sorrow, reaching to the very depths of the heart. The memory of those who fell on the thirteenth of December, and many of whom lie in unknown graves back of Fredericksburg, will never lose its freshness, but rather grow in strength as the history of future years adds significance to the conflicts of the present.
Fortunately for the success of Burnside’s plan of evacuation, his operations were concealed in the darkness of a severe storm, which had not terminated when we arrived in our former camp on the morning of the sixteenth. In the afternoon the two hundred and fifty men of the Twenty-seventh who had been picketing along the Rappahannock for the previous six days, rejoined us, many of them much exhausted by their unusually prolonged duties. Expecting to be absent from the regiment only a day, the ordinary limit of picket duty at one time, the party took with them only one day’s rations, and in the confusion attending the movement of troops and the battle, rations for the additional time could be procured but irregularly and in insufficient quantities.
According to orders, the camp was now moved to a strip of pine woods skirting the west side of the division parade-ground. But this was not to be our permanent location; and after manœuvring for several days from one place to another, we at length encamped in the edge of a forest, only a few rods from where we first pitched our tents, on the line of the Rappahannock. An elevated plain stretched away between us and the river, and above
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 a slight depression the clustered spires of Fredericksburg rose to view, from whose belfreys, on a Sabbath morning, we could sometimes hear the summons to the house of God. A walk of a few rods brought us in full view of the city, sitting in calm quiet among the hills, while long red lines told where the rebel earthworks lay, and little specks of white in the background disclosed the enemy’s camps. Just under the edge of the bluff to our right, and concealed from view, was the village of Falmouth, a mongrel collection of houses arranged along dirty, unpaved streets.
Although intimations were thrown out that the army would now go into winter quarters, yet it was nearly two weeks before our men could dispossess themselves of the idea that some fine morning the old stereotyped order, “Strike tents and pack knapsacks!” would scatter to the winds their plans of personal comfort.
As soon as it was evident that no further movements would be made, the men vigorously applied themselves to the work of building huts, devoting the mornings to this labor, while brigade drill occupied the afternoon. In the hundred and thirty log houses of our little regimental village was embraced an amount of comfort wholly inconceivable by those who know nothing of the numerous contrivances a soldier’s ingenuity can suggest to supply the place of ordinary conveniences. Generally, four congenial minds would unite their mechanical resources. A pine forest within reasonable distance, an axe and a shovel, one of Uncle Sam’s mule teams, and a moderate degree of ingenuity, constitute the only capital of these camp carpenters. Having secured a favorable site, ten by seven, these comrades in bunk sally forth to the neighboring grove, and before their sturdy
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 blows the old pines come crashing down, are split into slabs of the required length, and in due time reach their destination in camp. After smoothing the ground, and carefully removing stumps, the logs are hewn out and placed one above another, with the ends dove-tailed together, or set upright side by side in trenches, and soon the huts assume their full proportions—seven feet by ten. Every man now becomes a mason. The surrounding region is ransacked for stone and brick, with which to construct a fire-place at the front end. While this important work is going on, another is vigorously plying his wooden trowel, in plastering up the fissures with clay, on the principle that nothing is without its use, even Virginia mud. The roof is made of thin shelter-tents, buttoned together. As regards internal arrangements, at the further end are two bunks, one above the other; and as the upholsterer has not performed his part, and very likely never will, the occupants must content themselves with the soft side of pine slabs. On one side of the hut is a rack for the reception of guns and equipments, while at the other a cracker-box cover on stilts does duty as a table. In respect to seats, the ingenuity of different individuals showed itself in rudely constructed benches, or square boards, elevated on three-pronged crotchets, obtained in the woods, or was satisfied with the trunk of a tree cut into suitable lengths. Over the fire-place a mantle was generally located, containing a confused collection of tin plates and cups, knives and forks, and an endless variety of rubbish. In winter quarters it is very desirable to have a liberal supply of culinary furniture. The man whose fire-place is adorned with an iron frying-pan, is an object of envy to all his comrades, and is universally agreed to have reached
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 the acme of comfort. However, the halves of old canteens, fitted with handles, answer very well in its place. In many of the huts, telegraph wire might be found doing service in the shape of a gridiron, upon which an occasional steak is broiled. Very likely, in its appropriate place is a coffee-pot, perhaps of the plantation style, two feet high, and large in proportion, which some argus-eyed soldier has observed and quietly confiscated.
Our huts were now nearly completed, and with no little satisfaction we surveyed their rough architecture, pork-barrel chimneys, and cracker-box doors, feeling that though the winds might blow, and the rainy season pour down its floods, we were prepared to endure it patiently. When the army has just completed its preparations for a comfortable time, it is safe to prophesy marching orders within three days thereafter. So it proved in the present instance. At dress parade, on the sixteenth of January, an order was read for the regiment to be ready to march on the next day with three days’ rations. Details were dispatched at midnight to the Brigade Commissary’s, after rations, and in good season on the seventeenth we were ready to start; but no final orders came, and it was bruited about that General J. E. B. Stuart, while roving around Dumfries and Alexandria with his rebel cavalry, in the absence of General Burnside in Washington, had telegraphed an order, as if from him, for the army to be ready to move. This is of a piece with a joke Stuart perpetrated on another occasion, when in the name of a union General he telegraphed to Washington for certain stores, and is reported to have received them in good ............