—Scott.
As the train pulled out of Danville that morning, our hopes began to rise in proportion to the distance we placed between ourselves and our late prison.
We had now been in the Confederate prisons seven months, and we had high hopes that our guards were telling us the truth, for once.
I am not prepared to say that the people of the South are not as truthful as other people; but I will say, that truth was a commodity, which appeared to be very scarce with our guards.
When we left the Danville prison, we took with us, contrary to orders, a wooden bucket belonging to my mess.
The way we stole it out of prison was this. One of the men cut a number into each stave, then knocked off the hoops and took it down, dividing hoops, staves and bottom among us, these we rolled up in our blankets and keeping together we entered the same car. After the train had started we unrolled our blankets, took out the fragments of bucket, and set it up again. This was a very fortunate thing for us, as it furnished us a vessel in which to procure water on that long and dreary trip.
Nothing of note occurred until we reached Burkeville Junction, near the scene of the collapse of the Confederacy. Here we were switched off from the Richmond road on to the Petersburg road. Some of us who were least hopeful considered this a bad omen; others argued that it was all right, as we could take cars from Petersburg to City Point. Among the latter class were some men who had been prisoners before, and were supposed to know more than the rest of us about the modes of exchange. We therefore said no more and tried hard to believe that all would end well.
We arrived at Petersburg a little before midnight. We were immediately marched across the Appomattox River bridge into Petersburg. As we were marching along I noticed a large building, which I recognized as one I had seen the previous November, while we were marching through this place on our way to Richmond. I told the boys we were going to the Weldon Depot, the right direction for the South. The hopeful ones still insisted that it was all right, but I could not see it that way. But the question was soon settled, for we arrived at the Weldon Depot in a short time. How our hearts sank within us as we came to the low sheds and buildings, which form the Station of the Petersburg and Weldon R. R. Heretofore during the day, “God’s Country,” and home had seemed very near to us, but now all these hopes were suddenly dashed to the ground, and dark despair, like a black pall, enshrouded us. I believe that most of us wished that dark, rainy night, that it had been our fate to have fallen upon the field of battle, and received a soldier’s burial.
Those of us who had read Shakspere could have exclaimed with Hamlet.—
“To be, or not to be, that is the question: