Chapter 19

CAPT. HENRI WIRZ--SOME DESCRIPTION OF A SMALL-MINDED PERSONAGE, WHO
GAINED GREAT NOTORIETY--FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH HIS DISCIPLINARY METHOD.

The emptying of the prisons at Danville and Richmond into Andersonville
went on slowly during the month of March. They came in by train loads of
from five hundred to eight hundred, at intervals of two or three days.
By the end of the month there were about five thousand in the stockade.
There was a fair amount of space for this number, and as yet we suffered
no inconvenience from our crowding, though most persons would fancy that
thirteen acres of ground was a rather limited area for five thousand men
to live, move and have their being a upon. Yet a few weeks later we were
to see seven times that many packed into that space.

One morning a new Rebel officer came in to superintend calling the roll.
He was an undersized, fidgety man, with an insignificant face, and a
mouth that protruded like a rabbit's. His bright little eyes, like those
of a squirrel or a rat, assisted in giving his countenance a look of
kinship to the family of rodent animals--a genus which lives by stealth
and cunning, subsisting on that which it can steal away from stronger and
braver creatures. He was dressed in a pair of gray trousers, with the
other part of his body covered with a calico garment, like that which
small boys used to wear, called "waists." This was fastened to the
pantaloons by buttons, precisely as was the custom with the garments of
boys struggling with the orthography of words in two syllables. Upon his
head was perched a little gray cap. Sticking in his belt, and fastened
to his wrist by a strap two or three feet long, was one of those
formidable looking, but harmless English revolvers, that have ten barrels
around the edge of the cylinder, and fire a musket-bullet from the
center. The wearer of this composite costume, and bearer of this amateur
arsenal, stepped nervously about and sputtered volubly in very broken
English. He said to Wry-Necked Smith:

"Py Gott, you don't vatch dem dam Yankees glose enough! Dey are
schlippin' rount, and peatin' you efery dimes."

This was Captain Henri Wirz, the new commandant of the interior of the
prison. There has been a great deal of misapprehension of the character
of Wirz. He is usually regarded as a villain of large mental caliber,
and with a genius for cruelty. He was nothing of the kind. He was
simply contemptible, from whatever point of view he was studied.
Gnat-brained, cowardly, and feeble natured, he had not a quality that
commanded respect from any one who knew him. His cruelty did not seem
designed so much as the ebullitions of a peevish, snarling little temper,
united to a mind incapable of conceiving