For the purpose of tracking escaped prisoners, an aggregate of seventy blood-hounds were kept at Andersonville. They were run in packs of five or six, unless a number of prisoners had escaped, in which case a larger number were used. They were in charge of a genuine “nigger driver” whose delight it was to follow their loud baying, as they tracked fugitive negroes, or escaped Yanks through the forests and swamps of southern Georgia.
These blood-hounds were trained to track human beings, and with their keen scent they held to the track as steadily, relentlessly as death itself; and woe betide the fugitive when overtaken, they tore and lacerated him with the blood-thirsty fierceness of a Numidian lion.
These willing beasts and more willing guards were efficient factors in the hands of Winder and Wirz in keeping in subjection the prisoners entrusted to their care. But these are outside forces. Within the wooden walls of that prison were more subtile and enervating forces at work than Georgia militia or fierce blood-hound.
Diarrhea, scurvy and its concomitant, gangrene, the result of insufficient and unsuitable food and the crowded and filthy state of the prison, were doing their deadly work, swiftly, surely and relentlessly.
CHAPTER VIII.
“Ghost. I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres;
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,