CHAPTER XXII.
CHIEFLY CULINARY.
It was Frederick the Great, I believe, who said that "An army, like a serpent, goes upon its belly,"—which was but another way of saying that if you want men to fight well, you must feed them well.
Of provisions, Uncle Sam usually gave us a sufficiency; but the table to which he invited his boys was furnished with little variety and less delicacy. On first entering the service, the drawing of our rations was not a small undertaking, for there were nearly a hundred of us in the company, and it takes a considerable weight of bread and pork to feed a hundred hungry stomachs. But after we had been in the field a year or two, the call, "Fall in for your hard-tack!" was leisurely responded to by only about a dozen men,—lean, sinewy, hungry-looking fellows, each with his haversack in hand. I can see them yet as they sat squatting around a gum-blanket spread on the ground, on which were a small heap of sugar, another of coffee, and another of rice, may be, which the corporal was dealing out by successive spoonfuls, as the boys held open their little black bags to receive their portion, while near by lay a small piece of salt pork or beef, or possibly a dozen potatoes.
Much depended, of course, on the cooking of the provisions furnished us. At first we tried a company cook; but we soon learned that the saying of Miles Standish,—
"If you wish a thing to be well done,
You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!"
applied to cooking quite as well as to courting. We therefore soon dispensed with our cook, and although scarcely any of us knew how to cook so much as a cup of coffee when we took the field, a keen appetite, aided by that necessity which is ever the mother of invention, soon taught us how bean-soup should be made and hard-tack prepared.
Hard-tack! It is a question which I have much debated with myself while writing, whether this chapter should not be entitled "Hard-Tack." For as this article of diet was the grand staff of life to the Boys in Blue, it would seem that but little could be said of the culinary art in camp without involving some mention of hard-tack at almost every turn.