Excerpt from Camp Fire Stories: A Series of Sketches of the Union Army in the Southwest Somehow a story seems to tell what war meant, in all its phases, better than does a mere description; and what a man has seen and felt is better understood if the incidents of the seeing and feeling are graphically told by the one who did them both. So I have yielded as the boys have urged that I write these stories out as they have been told at Our Grand Army camp-fires; because, they said, we old soldiers would be soon dead, and the young folks who had grown up to take our places should. Have left them our legacy of experience-the fun and the pathos, the drama and the tragedy - that they might know what their fathers went through in saving this country dur ing its first internecine strife. Therefore I have written these camp-fire stories for the Old comrades in arms to the reviving of their memories, and for their sons and daughters to the let ting them see what war was. Five of the hospital stories were published a few years ago in the Golden Rule, the organ of the Y'. P. S. C. E, though even these are retold in this book; two Or three have been published in local papers; and at, least two of the jokes I gave to Harper's Drawer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.