Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 06.djvu/17

Rh pig was an uncommon dish, this one having been kicked by one of the battery horses while stealing corn and instantly killed. The civilian seemed to doubt the statement after his teeth had come down hard on a pistol bullet, and continued to doubt though assured that it was the head of a horse-shoe nail.

The most melancholy eating a soldier was ever forced to do, was when pinched with hunger, cold, wet and dejected, he wandered over the deserted field of battle and satisfied his cravings with the contents of the haversacks of the dead. If there is anything which will overcome the natural abhorrence which a man feels for the enemy, the loathing of the bloated dead and the awe engendered by the presence of death, solitude and silence, it is hunger. Impelled by its clamoring men of high principle and tenderest humanity, become for the time void of sensibility and condescend to acts which, though justified by their extremity, seem afterwards even to the doers, too shameless to mention.

When rations became so very small that it was absolutely necessary to supplement them, and the camp was permanently established, those men who had the physical ability worked for the neighborhood farmers at cutting cord-wood, harvesting the crops, killing hogs or any other farm-work. A stout man would cut a cord of wood a day and receive fifty cents in money or its equivalent in something eatable. Hogs were slaughtered for the "fifth quarter." When the corn became large enough to eat, the roasting ears, thrown in the ashes with the shucks on and nicely roasted, made a grateful meal. Turnip and onion patches also furnished delightful and much-needed food, good, raw or cooked.

Occasionally, when a mess was hard pushed for eatables, it became necessary to resort to some ingenious method of disgusting a part of the mess, that the others might eat their fill. The "pepper treatment" was a common method practiced with the soup, which once failed. A shrewd fellow who loved things "hot" decided to have plenty of soup, and to accomplish his purpose, as he passed and repassed the boiling pot, dropped in a pod of red pepper. But, alas! for him, there was another man like minded who adopted the same plan, and the result was the "mess" waited in vain for that pot of soup to cool.

The individual coffee boiler of one man in the Army of Northern Virginia was always kept at the boiling point. The owner of it was an enigma to his comrades. They could not understand his strange fondness for "red-hot" coffee. Since the war he has