March 13
While we were cooking some arrowroot in our parlor for a Vermont private, sick in this hotel, Joe came in, back from Fairfax for a ride. The officers had been all over the old battlefield at Bull Run, McDowell crying, and all of them serious enough. The rebel works at Centreville, Joe says, are splendid, as formidable as any of ours about Washington. Their winter quarters were capital log houses, enough to accommodate 100,000 men. The burial ground was near at hand, and not far away a field of hundreds of dead horses. The works at Manassas were very slight, mounted in the most conspicuous places with logs of wood painted black. The rebels had been evacuating for some time, but, at the last, left in a sort of panic, leaving dead bodies lying beside coffins, and quantities of food, clothing and baggage of all kinds, some of it fired.