Chapter 68 - Page 2

snow-laden clouds
swept across the sky before the soughing wind.

The ground, frozen hard and stiff, cut and hurt our bare feet at every
step; an icy breeze drove in through the holes in our rags, and smote our
bodies like blows from sticks. The trees and shrubbery around were as
naked and forlorn as in the North in the days of early Winter before the
snow comes.

Over and around us hung like a cold miasma the sickening odor peculiar to
Southern forests in Winter time.

Out of the naked, repelling, unlovely earth rose the Stockade, in hideous
ugliness. At the gate the two men continued at their monotonous labor of
tossing the dead of the previous day into the wagon-heaving into that
rude hearse the inanimate remains that had once tempted gallant, manly
hearts, glowing with patriotism and devotion to country--piling up
listlessly and wearily, in a mass of nameless, emaciated corpses,
fluttering with rags, and swarming with vermin, the pride, the joy of a
hundred fair Northern homes, whose light had now gone out forever.

Around the prison walls shambled the guards, blanketed like Indians,
and with faces and hearts of wolves. Other Rebels--also clad in dingy
butternut--slouched around lazily, crouched over diminutive fires,
and talked idle gossip in the broadest of "nigger" dialect. Officers
swelled and strutted hither and thither, and negro servants loitered
around, striving to spread the least amount of work over the greatest
amount of time.

While I stood gazing in gloomy silence at the depressing surroundings
Andrews, less speculative and more practical, saw a good-sized pine stump
near by, which had so much of the earth washed away from it that it
looked as if it could be readily pulled up. We had had bitter experience
in other prisons as to the value of wood, and Andrews reasoned that as we
would be likely to have a repetition of this in the Stockade we were
about to enter, we should make an effort to secure the stump. We both
attacked it, and after a great deal of hard work, succeeded in uprooting
it. It was very lucky that we did, since it was the greatest help in
preserving our lives through the three long months that we remained at
Florence.

While we were arranging our stump so as to carry it to the best
advantage, a vulgar-faced man, with fiery red hair, and wearing on his
collar the yellow bars of a Lieutenant, approached. This was Lieutenant
Barrett, commandant of the interior of the prison, and a more inhuman
wretch even than Captain Wirz, because he had a little more brains than
the commandant at Andersonville, and this extra intellect was wholly
devoted to cruelty. As he came near he commanded, in loud, brutal tones:

"Attention, Prisoners!"