Chapter 31

DYING BY INCHES--SEITZ, THE SLOW, AND HIS DEATH--STIGGALL AND EMERSON
--RAVAGES ON THE SCURVY.

May and June made sad havoc in the already thin ranks of our battalion.
Nearly a score died in my company--L--and the other companies suffered
proportionately. Among the first to die of my company comrades, was a
genial little Corporal, "Billy" Phillips--who was a favorite with us all.
Everything was done for him that kindness could suggest, but it was of
little avail. Then "Bruno" Weeks--a young boy, the son of a preacher,
who had run away from his home in Fulton County, Ohio, to join us,
succumbed to hardship and privation.

The next to go was good-natured, harmless Victor Seitz, a Detroit cigar
maker, a German, and one of the slowest of created mortals. How he ever
came to go into the cavalry was beyond the wildest surmises of his
comrades. Why his supernatural slowness and clumsiness did not result in
his being killed at least once a day, while in the service, was even
still farther beyond the power of conjecture. No accident ever happened
in the company that Seitz did not have some share in. Did a horse fall
on a slippery road, it was almost sure to be Seitz's, and that imported
son of the Fatherland was equally sure to be caught under him. Did
somebody tumble over a bank of a dark night, it was Seitz that we soon
heard making his way back, swearing in deep German gutterals, with
frequent allusion to 'tausend teuflin.' Did a shanty blow down, we ran
over and pulled Seitz out of the debris, when he would exclaim:

"Zo! dot vos pretty vunny now, ain't it?"

And as he surveyed the scene of his trouble with true German phlegm, he
would fish a brier-wood pipe from the recesses of his pockets, fill it
with tobacco, and go plodding off in a cloud of smoke in search of some
fresh way to narrowly escape destruction. He did not know enough about
horses to put a snaffle-bit in one's mouth, and yet he would draw the
friskiest, most mettlesome animal in the corral, upon whose back he was
scarcely more at home than he would be upon a slack rope. It was no
uncommon thing to see a horse break out of ranks, and go past the
battalion like the wind, with poor Seitz clinging to his mane like the
traditional grim Death to a deceased African. We then knew that Seitz
had thoughtlessly sunk the keen spurs he would persist in wearing; deep
into the flanks of his high-mettled animal.

These accidents became so much a matter-of-course that when anything
unusual occurred in the company our first impulse was to go and help
Seitz out.

When the bugle sounded "boots and saddles," the rest of us would pack up,
mount, "count off by fours from the right," and be ready to