Fifty years in camp and field
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| Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock |
diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, U.S.A.
The writer of the following sketch or sketches of the campaign of General Scott in Mexico does not emulate the ambition of the author of Paradise Lost; he does not aim to pro- duce what the world will not let die willingly; he does not aim, properly speaking, to produce anything; but as something has been done by the American armies in Mexico of which he has personal knowledge, he feels called upon to publish what he knows.
If what he publishes survives the present age, it will owe its preservation to the extraordinary character of the campaign and not to its own merits as a composition. The author is a soldier and not a writer. He states this simply as a fact, and not to guard against or deprecate criticism.
Those who read for information will duly consider the disadvantages under which an unpractised writer must labour. "But the author confesses that he writes more for a succeed- ing age than for the present, and he feels safe in thus indicating his purpose; for if the work does not pass beyond the present time it will not live to accuse his memory of presumption.
The writer is accustomed to looking into past times signalized by important events and to reflecting upon the great value of contemporary accounts of those events, particularly when they proceed from actors; and he thinks an additional value attaches to such accounts when they come from actors who, while in a position to know the truth, were not in a position to write under a bias as seeking their own fame.
The writer considers himself in a special manner as falling within this description of actors in the campaign of General Scott', and in order to make this appear he proposes at once to indicate that position and to show that, while he occupied a place sufficiently elevated and confidential to know much of what transpired in the campaign,
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