Everybody agreed that the Washington's Birthday ball was the most brilliant event of the winter. Unlike most social functions in this army camp by the Rapidan, it was not held in a tent. There was a special weatherproof ballroom - a big box of a building more than a hundred feet long, whose construction had kept scores of enlisted men busy. Some of these had been sent into the woods to fell trees. Others had taken over and operated an abandoned sawmill, to reduce the trees to boards. Still others, carpenters in some former incarnation, had taken these boards and built the building itself, and it was pleasantly odorous of new-cut pine, decorated with all of the headquarters and regimental flags which the II Army Corps possessed. The flags may have been worth seeing. It was a boast of this corps that although it had suffered nearly 19,000 battle casualties it had never yet lost a flag to the enemy.
- From A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
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