“But as long as he doesn’t see fit to forward it we can’t issue it to the prisoners,” added the sergeant. “You don’t want some Home Guard to report to him that you are a deserter, do you?”
“I should say not,” exclaimed Marcy. “If that’s the sort of a brute he is, I would stand no show at all with him. But no one can prove that I have ever been in the army before.”
“They might put you to some trouble to prove that you haven’t, and my object in bringing you out here was to warn you that you’d better not throw on any military airs while you stay in this camp.”
“I am very grateful to you,” replied Marcy, who did not expect to find a sympathizing friend in a rebel non-commissioned officer. “You are not a Home Guard?”
“Not much. I was one of the first men in our county to volunteer, but I couldn’t stand hard campaigning, and so I asked to be put on light duty, and I had influence enough to carry my point. But I would have stayed in the army till I died if I had dreamed that I would be sent to help guard a slaughterhouse; for that is just what this stockade is. The commander is nothing but a Home Guard, but he hates conscripts as bad as he does Yankees, and you want to watch out and do nothing to incur his displeasure.”
“I don’t know how to thank you——” began Marcy.
“That’s all right. I knew as soon as I looked at you that you are as much out of place here as I am, and I don’t want to see you get into trouble. Of course you won’t repeat what I have said to you.”
“Not by a long shot. You have done me too great a favor.”
The two separated, and Marcy went into the barracks and sought his bunk, feeling as if he were in some way to blame for the sufferings of the Union soldiers who were confined within the stockade. That they should be allowed to perish for want of food, when there was an abundance of it scattered along the line of the railroad within easy reach of the prison, seemed so terrible to Marcy that he could not dismiss it from his mind so that he could go to sleep. He did not then know that the Confederate commissary was the worst managed branch of the army, and that General Bragg’s men had been on short rations while in Corinth there was a pile of hard tack as long and high as the railroad depot that was going to waste. Our starving boys in Libby prison could look through the grated windows upon the fertile fields of Manchester, “waving with grain and alive with flocks and herds,” and General Lee wrote that there were supplies enough in the country, and if the proper means were taken to procure them there would not be so many desertions from his army. Every Union soldier who died for want of food in Southern prison pens was deliberately murdered, and the Richmond papers declared that General Winder was to blame for it. If the latter had not been summoned by death to answer before a higher tribunal, there is no doubt but that he would have been hanged by sentence of court martial as Captain Wirz was.
Marcy Gray scarcely closed his eyes in slumber that night, and when he did, his sleep was disturbed by horrible dreams in which starving prisoners and unfeeling Confederate officers bore prominent parts. He arose from his bunk as weary and dispirited as he was when he got into it, breakfasted on a cup of sweet potato coffee and a small piece of corn bread, and when the adjutant’s call sounded was one of the first to appear on the parade ground; but he did not take as much pains to fall in like a soldier as he did the day before. On the contrary he seemed to be the greenest one among the conscripts, for when he was commanded to “dress up a little on the right centre” he did not move until the adjutant shook his sword at him and asked if he were hard of hearing.