Southern Soldier Stories

by George Cary Eggleston

Our state of mind, however, was curiously illustrative of the character of the contest, and of the people who participated in it on the part of the South. The Southern folk were always debaters, loving logic, and taking off their hats to a syllogism.

They had never been able to understand how any reasonable mind could doubt the right of secession, or fail to see the unlawfulness and iniquity of coercion, and they were in a chronic state of astonished incredulity, as the war began, that the North could indeed be about to wage a war that was manifestly forbidden by unimpeachable logic.

In the same way, at Cold Harbor, we were all disposed to waste a good deal of intellectual energy in demonstrating to each other the absurd and unreasonable character of General Grant’s procedure. We could show that he must have lost already in that campaign more men than Lee’s entire force, and ought, logically, to acknowledge his defeat and retire; that having begun the contest with an overwhelming advantage in point of numbers, he ought to be ashamed to ask for reinforcements; and that while continuing the process of suffering great losses, in order to inflict much smaller losses on us, he could ultimately wear us out, it was inconceivable that any general should consent to win in that unfair way.

In like manner we were prepared to prove the wicked imbecility of his plan of campaign—a plan that could only end by placing him in a position below Richmond and Petersburg, which he might just as well reach by an advance from Fort Monroe, without the tremendous slaughter of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, etc.

In view of General Grant’s stolid indifference to considerations of this character, however, there was nothing for us to do but fight the matter out.

We had no fear of the ultimate result, however plainly our own perception of facts pointed to the inevitable destruction of our power of resistance. We had absolute faith in Lee’s ability to meet and repel any assault that might be made, and to devise some means of destroying Grant. There was, therefore, no fear in the Confederate ranks of anything that General Grant might do; but there was an appalling and well-founded fear of starvation, which indeed some of us were already suffering. From the beginning of that campaign our food-supply had been barely sufficient to maintain life, and on the march from Spottsylvania to Cold Harbor it would have been a gross exaggeration to describe it in that way.

In my own battery, three hard biscuits and one very meagre slice of fat pork were issued to each man on our arrival, and that was the first food that any of us had seen since our departure from Spottsylvania, two days before. The next supply did not come till two days later, and it consisted of a single cracker per man, with no meat at all.

We practised a very rigid economy with this food, of course. We ate the pork raw, partly because there was no convenient means of cooking it, but more because cooking would have involved some waste. We hoarded what we had, allowing ourselves only a nibble at any one time, and that only when the pangs of hunger became unbearable.

But what is the use of writing about the pangs of hunger? The words are utterly meaningless to persons who have never known actual starvation, and they cannot be made other than meaningless. Hunger to starving men is wholly unrelated to the desire for food as that is commonly understood and felt. It is a great agony of the whole body and soul as well. It is an unimaginable, all-pervading pain, inflicted when the strength to endure pain is utterly gone. It is the great, despairing cry of a wasting body—a cry of flesh and blood, marrow, nerves, bones, and faculties for strength with which to exist and to endure existence. It is a horror which, once suffered, leaves an impression that is never erased from the memory, and to this day the agony of that campaign comes back upon me at the mere thought of any living creature’s lacking the food it desires, even though its hunger be only the ordinary craving, and the denial be necessary for the creature’s health.

When we reached Cold Harbor, the command to which I belonged had been marching almost continuously day and night for more than fifty hours without food; and, for the first time, we knew what actual starvation was. It was during that march that I heard a man wish himself a woman,—the only case of the kind I ever heard of,—and he uttered the wish half in grim jest, and made haste to qualify it by adding “or a baby.”