Page:The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-Life .djvu/256

212 our old colonels—Tracy and Catlin. The boys were marched up to the barracks, where they were to remain till paid, and mustered out, and then ate their bread and drank their coffee.

I went to the American Hotel with the steward, and at eleven took the passenger train for Ithaca, arriving at sundown, feeling that I had won my rest.

"What accommodations did you have in coming home?" one acquaintance said to me, and I told him, "cattle-cars." Yes—cattle-cars, hardly cleansed of the filth which had accumulated by long and continued use. No wonder the soldiers felt the degradation—drawn from point to point like cattle for the slaughter-pen. Denied air—was it any wonder that they thrust bayonets through the blank car sides, and admitted the free air and light of Heaven, if nothing else, into the dark noisome dens.

It is a foul blot on the nation's escutcheon that her defenders should have been transported as they were often in condemned vessels, and on cars on board of which a conscientious drover would hesitate to consign his choice market stock.

Who fought the battles—who endured the long, weary foot marches, and finally achieved the triumph of victory? Not the starred and epauletted men who rode noble chargers, and for whose service railway companies and steamboat captains tendered their most sumptuous conveyances. Not the Honorable Sirs whose advent from point to point, from city to city, was one continued ovation, but those brawny