Initiation into combat sometimes elicited from soldier correspondents choice comments about their experiences and reactions. A Federal infantryman wrote to his father shortly after his first skirmish in Virginia: ``Dear Pa. Went out a Skouting yesterday. We got to one house where there were five secessionist they brok + run and Arch holored out to shoot the ornery suns of biches and we all let go at them. Thay may say what they please but godamit Pa it is fun.''

Some of the choicest remarks made by soldiers in their letters were in disparagement of unpopular officers. A Mississippi soldier wrote: ``Our General Reub Davis is a vain, stuck-up, illiterate ass.'' An Alabamian wrote: ``Col. Henry is [an ignoramus] fit for nothing higher than the cultivation of corn.'' A Floridian stated that his officers were ``not fit to tote guts to a bear.'' On December 9, 1862, Sergeant Edwin H. Fay, an unusual Louisianan who held A. B. and M. A. degrees from Harvard University and who before the war was headmaster of a private school for boys in Louisiana, wrote his wife: ``I saw Pemberton and he is the most insignificant puke I ever saw. His head cannot contain enough sense to command a regiment, much less a corps. Jackson runs first and his Cavalry are well drilled to follow their leader. He is not worth shucks. But he is a West Point graduate and therefore must be born to command.''