Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1899-01-16

| a few or the "SOfU Shells" and the
fellow who is making an article for
his paper. Some soldiers, but not
many, will growl at anything. In
this they are like other folks. We
had one fellow in our company who
complained to his dear mamma that
he couldn't get any butter! Butter
for soldier! and away down in the
Ozark mountains, an hundred miles
from a railroad, and the last COW in
the township turned into army beef!
Another soldier sent some sort of
complaint home, and his mamma told
the neighbors that the 'sojers were a
havin' orful hard time. Pete hadn't
anything to eat but his bunk!" There
army, and some of them in front of
the enemy, when we had slittle or no
food. We marched Emore than once
for days without cracker from the
commissary. What we could pick up
We did, and sometimes that was little,
but nothing was said about it. Once
in Texas we were some days without
anything but horse feed, and not
much of that, but no growl was print
ed because the ships failed to come in
on time. We lacked correspondent!
| I, with others, have marched through
ice and snow for many miles with feet
rubbing through the remains of what
| had been shoes, and those the clouts
picked up in deserted camp. Many
| time the rations were rusty, picked
pork, or side meat out of which the
maggots were picked before it went
into the frying-pan, and "hard- tack"
so old worms had spun their webs in
it and the ubiquitous ''weevil' had
raised scores of a family within it's
sides. Even near the close of the war
when things were running we'll, we
used to break the crackers into water,
and their inhabitants would come to
the top sooner than drown.
Camp health cannot be regulated
from Washington Or by army .regula-
tions. That depends exclusively on
the men themselves and their officers.
Early in 1861 we had scOurge of ty-
phoid in our camp, which was occu-
pied jointly with Grants Illinois reg
iment. 1t came from the pollution of
Silver Greek, our water supply. 1t
swept into all quarters, and men died
by the score. The memory sof it is
one of the most terrible I have of the
war. My own bunkmate, with whom
I shared blankets, went down and
died. I nursed him and laid him out.
and l see him yet in his last hours,
and as he lay with a row of others
next morning in the "dead house." 1t
was just the same in many other
places. The rough, coarse food was
not suited to that disease or to camp
Observation-Disclosures scourge. We had
no Red Gross kindness, and within
two hundred miles of our own state
we were short of the necessary hos
pital supplies. They came3 after
awhile, but the graveyard was already
full. We shook and burned in the
Arkansas swamps and could not get
quinine. Instead, we swallowed will
low bark decoction by the quart as
the best thing at hand. None of us
howled for an investigation of the
War Department. 1t was war, just as
they had it in Egypt and at Moscow
under Napoleon, the prince of COM
manders, only not tenth as bad, and
we knew the nation was not ready for
the strife which had begun, and that
it was caring for its soldiers as we'll as
it could, and would rectify mistakes
as soon as possible. Men froze to
death in many places in those awful
years, they died by hundreds of hos
pital gangrene, they went hungry
many day, and persisted after con-
valescence had begun because inva-
lids food could not be obtained, and
yet the war was as humane a one,
alike to our own troops and the en-
envy, as ever was waged.
have said that camp health de-
ponds largely on those in the camp. [
have known camps to be located in
swamps and in fields where four
inches of mud had to be shoveled out
to find bottom. That only meant that
the colonel or brigadier was fool and
did not know any better. Some reg
iments are not compelled to keep
their camps clean. The men will not
do it themselves. The cesspools and
closets are allowed to become un-
speakably vile. Their odors offend a
quarter of mile away. The water
supply becomes contaminated. Then
come typhoid and dysentery and re-
spect none. A camp may be kept in
as good sanitary condition as house,