Bet that's a great hunch- makes you wonder what the troops said to each other when they saw one, too. " Are you kidding me? You want us to what? " Doesn't it look like something you made as a kid, building forts in the woods, fooling around down at the creek?
These improvised things do flatten me though. It's one of the reasons I got stuck on the engineers, when first getting stuck on the Civil War- this tendency to magically create something out of pretty much nothing. Moving entire armies from point A to B- along with every, single wagon, piece of artillery, horse- all the infantry, what it took to feed them, just beyond massive. That was their job, maybe one of the reasons pontoons always flatten me. I mean, even corduroy roads- can't imagine what it took to create ten feet of one of those much less a mile.
They could take 2 armies, everyone could have been as mad at each other as they wanted but they both would have been still duking it out at Bull Run if it hadn't been for the engineers.
)
It IS a shame the word ' engineer' appears so dry- their Civil War achievements were miracles. Really mean that! My grandfather was a Civil Engineer, remember as a little girl asking him what one did, and he said ' Oh, lots of things, building bridges, for example '. I thought that was the most amazing thing anyone ever said.
Bringing the