Some of these marches were made in the night time, when the men would splash and flounder along through the mud, some swearing, some laughing and cracking jokes, and ever and anon, the "Bonnie Blue Flag," "Dixie," or some other patriotic song would be started, when the woodland would ring for miles with the songs, and the echoes go rolling through the swamps and marshes.
In some sections the roads ran through high and dry lands, the roadbeds filled with loose, white sand, over which the marching was very laborious; sometimes through the long-leaf pine turpentine orchards, as they were called—great forests of tall pines, the bark from two sides of the trees being scraped off, with steel-bladed knives on long poles, many feet from the ground, so that when the sap rises it exudes freely, running down the trunks of the trees into deep notches near the ground, cut with long-bladed axes, made for the purpose, and then dipped out into buckets and conveyed to the turpentine distillery.
During the winter these scraped-off surfaces are incrusted with dried rosin, which burns freely when set on fire, the blaze running up the trees many feet. On these night marches sometimes the soldiers would apply the torch to the rosin-covered trees along the roadside, when the woods and country around would be lighted up, the flames leaping up the tall pines to the very tops; the long, gray moss hanging in festoons from the branches of the live oaks interspersed among the pines, the glare of the long streaks of flame reflecting on the white sand, scintillating like carpets woven of silver threads and sprinkled with tiny diamonds; the gloom off in the woods beyond the penetration of the light, and anon the hooting of the big owl and the scream of the nighthawk—all brought to mind scenes described in fairy tales, where witches and goblins in fantastic attire and shapes participate in high carnival, reveling with kindred spirits in some vale of tangled wild-wood, deep hidden and embossed in the gloom, save for the glare of the torches of the devotees—while the gray lines of the soldiers, like grim spectral figures stalking along betwixt the blazing trees, the red lights flashing from their burnished muskets and bayonets, reflected on their begrimed faces, resembled gigantic and uncanny figures moving amidst the flames of some plutorion realm.