In the daytime the men lay in their bunks and slept, or read a great deal, or sat on them and wrote their letters. Unless otherwise forbidden, callers felt at liberty to perch on them; but there was such a wide difference in the habits of cleanliness of the soldiers that some proprietors of huts had, as they thought, sufficient reasons why no one else should occupy their berths but themselves, and so, if the three-legged stools or boxes did not furnish seating capacity enough for company, and the regular boarders, too, the r. b. would take to the bunks with a dispatch which betokened a deeper interest than that required of simple etiquette. This remark naturally leads me to say something of the insect life which seemed to have enlisted with the soldiers for “three years or during the war,” and which required and received a large share of attention in quarters, much more, in fact, than during active campaigning. I refer now, especially, to the Pediculus Vestimenti, as the scientific men call him, but whose picture when it is well taken, and somewhat magnified, bears this familiar outline. Old soldiers will recognize the picture if the name is an odd one to them. This was the historic “grayback” which went in and out before Union and Confederate soldiers without ceasing. Like death, it was no respecter of persons. It preyed alike on the just and the unjust. It inserted its bill as confidingly into the body of the major-general as of the lowest private. I once heard the orderly of a company officer relate that he had picked fifty-two graybacks from the shirt of his chief at one sitting. Aristocrat or plebeian it mattered not. Every soldier seemed foreordained to encounter this pest at close quarters. Eternal vigilance was not the price of liberty. That failed the most scrupulously careful veteran in active campaigning. True, the neatest escaped the longest, but sooner or later the time came when it was simply impossible for even them not to let the left hand know what the right hand was doing.
PEDICULUS VESTIMENTI.
The secretiveness which a man suddenly developed when he found himself inhabited for the first time was very entertaining. He would cuddle all knowledge of it as closely as the old Forty-Niners did the hiding-place of their bag of gold-dust. Perhaps he would find only one of the vermin. This he would secretly murder, keeping all knowledge of it from his tent-mates, while he nourished the hope that it was the Robinson Crusoe of its race cast away on a strange shore with none of its kind at hand to cheer its loneliness. Alas, vain delusion! In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this solitary pediculus would prove to be the advance guard of generations yet to come, which, ere its capture, had been stealthily engaged in sowing its seed; and in a space of time all too brief, after the first discovery the same soldier would appoint himself an investigating committee of one to sit with closed doors, and hie away to the desired seclusion. There he would seat himself taking his garments across his knees in turn, conscientiously doing his (k)nitting work, inspecting every fibre with the scrutiny of a dealer in broadcloths.
The feeling of intense disgust aroused by the first contact with these creepers soon gave way to hardened indifference, as a soldier realized the utter impossibility of keeping free from them, and the privacy with which he carried on his first “skirmishing,” as this “search for happiness” came to be called, was soon abandoned, and the warfare carried on more openly. In fact, it was the mark of a cleanly soldier to be seen engaged at it, for there was no disguising the fact that everybody needed to do it.
(K)NITTING WORK.
In cool weather “skirmishing” was carried on in quarters, but in warmer weather the men preferred to go outside of camp for this purpose; and the woods usually found near camps were full of them sprinkled about singly or in social parties of two or three slaying their victims by the thousands. Now and then a man could be seen just from the quartermaster with an entire new suit on his arm, bent on starting afresh. He would hang the suit on a bush, strip off every piece of the old, and set fire to the same, and then don the new suit of blue. So far well; but he was a lucky man if he did not share his new clothes with other hungry pediculi inside of a week.
“TURNING HIM OVER.”