Ask a survivor of this prison treatment, if perchance you can find one, how he preserved his life, and he will tell you, “By eating the rations of the dying.” Ten thousand men were sick or dying in this enclosure at one time.
After the carts, with their scanty burdens of food, had passed into the prison, and distributed their contents, ten or fifteen thousand of the haggard and starving men might be seen collected together in the central portion of the prison trading with each other. Some of the poor wretches would be offering a handful of peas for a knot of wood no larger than the human fist, in order that they might cook their allowance; others offering, in barter, their remnants of clothing—a cap, or a shoe, or anything they possessed—for a morsel of food.
PLAN OF PRISON BAKERY
ANDERSONVILLE Ga.
The little knots of wood above mentioned had a standard value of fifty cents; yet there were immense forests all around, and within sight on every side.
XIV.
There appears to have been but one kitchen for this vast assemblage, and that strangely situated—far in rear of the outer palisade, away from water-course or spring. The soil to-day does not present traces of a much-travelled road from its doorway to the main gate, distant about one third of a mile by the route taken. Consider the enormous weight of provisions which should have passed over this road when the prison contained more than twenty thousand men. This kitchen was a plain one-story shed, built of rough boards, one hundred feet in length, and less than fifty feet in width. It contained in the interior two medium-sized ranges, and four boilers of fifty gallons’ capacity each. The capacity indicated does not by far equal the cooking apparatus which is required and furnished to the Lincoln and Harewood Hospitals, of Washington, for twelve hundred men.
It is the opinion of the writer, who is familiar with the amount of cooking apparatus required by large hospitals and camps, that this kitchen, with its implements, could not, in the course of twenty-four hours, by constant relays of industrious workmen, have furnished cooked rations to more than five thousand men. There may have been other arrangements for cooking in the open air; but there are no longer any traces of such operations, nor has the writer any evidence that such was the case.
