Sunday, April 5.—Still raining. Captain Cannon said a dispatch had been received from the Secretary of War, that all civilians not attached to regular commands and liable to conscription, would have the privilege of joining any command they chose. I told Cannon I was a Marylander and that I would like to go to Richmond before making choice. He said I must first designate a command I wished to join. Told him then I would join Captain Mosby. He said I would be mustered in and leave as soon as possible.
Tuesday, April 7.—Went to Petersburg with Barnes, Wrenn and Biggins. Got plate of ham and eggs (two eggs and a piece of bacon), $1.25.
George Richardson, Gus Williams, Cooke, J. Mills and Benjamin F. Bowles left camp and went to Richmond. Williams, in bidding us good-bye, said he expected to be back in the Old Capitol within a week after leaving Richmond. He said this was the fourth time he had been a prisoner; that his two daughters and one son, about ten or twelve years of age, were arrested at the instigation of Union men and imprisoned three months.
Some of the Confederate officers from the Old Capitol Prison came down last night and reported at camp this morning: Captain Sherman, Major Breckenridge, Lieutenants Smith, Bixler and others. William M. Mills leaves camp to-morrow.
Thursday, April 9.—One of the prisoners from Camp Douglas told me that there was great mortality among the Confederate prisoners there. A large number were in the hospital, and the morning he left there were thirty corpses in the dead house. “It is no wonder they die off,” said he; “hundreds were frost-bitten and suffered terribly from the cold last winter. Fuel was given out so sparingly, that we had to treasure every little piece of wood and coal as if it was precious metal we were hoarding. Our rations were cut down so that we were never able to satisfy the craving of hunger. So long as we were allowed to receive food from benevolent persons outside of the prison some of the prisoners fared tolerably well, but when the order came prohibiting this we really suffered. Many poor fellows, broken down and emaciated by disease, passed away in the silence of the night and their companions in misery were in ignorance of the fact until the dawning of day exposed to their view the pale corpse in their midst.
“Our barracks were miserable, dilapidated buildings, and our prison guards were brutal in the extreme; they had never been to the front, nor within sight or sound of a battle. Kicks and curses were liberally dealt out, and prisoners were shot without any real provocation. Men were hung up by the thumbs until they fainted. One half-starved prisoner was shot while fishing bones out of a slop-barrel.”
Sunday, April 12.—Fine day. Yesterday I was passed out by Lieutenant Smith. Gathered some broom-sage and made a bed of it, so I slept more comfortably last night. Heavy cannonading heard yesterday.
About four o’clock this afternoon I was regularly mustered into the Confederate service, to serve under Mosby, now operating in the borderland of Virginia.
Lindsay, of Washington, went to Richmond, to be sent to Company K, Tenth Louisiana Regiment.
There have been so many prisoners brought here to Camp Parole lately that we are getting overcrowded. Coming from the prison pens of Camp Chase, Camp Douglas, Johnson’s Island, and other Northern prisons, where they have been confined for months, they are all more or less infested with vermin. It is a common sight to see an old soldier quietly seat himself in a line of unfortunates, on the sunny side of a fence or building sheltered from the cold wind, and deliberately drawing his shirt over his head, set to work industriously searching for vampires—picking them out from their hiding places in the folds and creases. Skirmishing, the boys term this occupation, though it might be called picketing. To kill the tiny creatures who seek to conceal themselves along the seams of the pants, and to destroy the eggs, two round stones are taken in the hands, and by clapping them together up and down the seams on the side of the legs of the pants the life is crushed out of a goodly number of the bloodthirsty crew.