“Chaplain, will you be kind enough to tell me what the two capital letters, B.C., stand for, when they are printed together upon anything?”

“O, yes. It means before the birth of our Saviour, previous to the beginning of the Christian era.” He proceeded to give quite a profound theological exposition of the matter, and then inquired, “Why did you ask so unusual a question?”

“O, nothin'” answered the innocent Dick,”only we have seen it stamped on these sheets of hard-tack, and were curious to know why it was there.”

Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Spottslyvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg…Theodore Gerrish was at them all with Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 20th Maine Regiment. His vivid, compassionate, and often humorous telling is from the spot on the field where the minie-balls are thickest and the cannonading is deafening.