Not many years since I spent a night with a comrade in his home in a city of central New York and we sat and smoked and talked, and talked and smoked, until long after midnight. The walls of his den were adorned with guns, sabres, canteens, cartridge boxes and belts and various other war relics. Conspicuously displayed among the other decorations was a battered and blackened coffee pot.
“Yes,” he replied in answer to my inquiry, “it is the same old coffee pot I carried from Washington to Appomattox and is one of my most cherished keepsakes.”
“About the time we went to the front I was in the city one day and knowing that a coffee pot was a very useful utensil to a soldier I invested in the best copper bottom one that I could find. There was not another one in the company and money could not buy one when we were in the field. Six of us regularly made coffee in it, and others used to take turns in borrowing it for various purposes, such as cooking rice, beans, meat, boiling shirts and the making of those famous old ‘Liverpool stews’ when we were fortunate enough to get an onion, two or three potatoes with hardtack, pepper and salt.”
“Many a batch of flap jacks have I stirred up in that old coffee pot, paying the sutler 25 cents a pound for self-rising flour. The ears and handle got melted off after a time, but I punched holes where the ears had been, hooked the bale in and so it lasted to the end. My wife wanted to scour the black off, but I wouldn’t have it.
“Why, it took the smoke of more than a thousand camp fires to put that finish on it!
“I thought once I had lost it. You remember the day we had that running fight at Sailor’s Creek when we were chasing Lee and waded the stream waist deep? The banks were steep, you know, and fringed with bushes that got tangled with our equipments as we went through them. Well, somehow or other my coffee pot got pulled off my haversack, but I did not know it until we had got some distance away, when one of the boys who used it regularly, exclaimed: ‘By thunder, Will, you’ve lost your coffee pot, and what in Sam Hill will we do for coffee now?’”
“I remembered having it when we crossed the creek, for several of us used it to fill our canteens, so I told my pardner I was going back after it. I found it hanging to a bush and was better pleased than if I had picked up a hundred dollar greenback.”
ARMY CHAPLAINS.
Just why the 2d New York did not have a chaplain I do not know, and it is too late now to find out. Probably the officers didn’t want one or else there were not enough to go around among the 2,000 or more organizations in the service, for we were not the only regiment without one.
There were some grand men who served as chaplains and they not only ministered to the soldiers in spiritual matters, but looked after the welfare of the men in many ways. Particularly were they of service to the wounded on the battlefield. I never heard of a cowardly chaplain and instances are not few in number where they were wounded or taken prisoner. There were also several killed in battle.