BELLE ISLE--TERRIBLE SUFFERING FROM COLD AND HUNGER--FATE OF LIEUTENANT
BOISSEUX’S DOG--OUR COMPANY MYSTERY--TERMINATION OF ALL HOPES OF ITS
SOLUTION.
In February my chum--B. B. Andrews, now a physician in Astoria,
Illinois --was brought into our building, greatly to my delight and
astonishment, and from him I obtained the much desired news as to the
fate of my comrades. He told me they had been sent to Belle Isle,
whither he had gone, but succumbing to the rigors of that dreadful
place, he had been taken to the hospital, and, upon his convalesence,
placed in our prison.
Our men were suffering terribly on the island. It was low, damp, and
swept by the bleak, piercing winds that howled up and down the surface
of the James. The first prisoners placed on the island had been given
tents that afforded them some shelter, but these were all occupied when
our battalion came in, so that they were compelled to lie on the snow
and frozen ground, without shelter, covering of any kind, or fire.
During this time the cold had been so intense that the James had frozen
over three times.
The rations had been much worse than ours. The so-called soup had been
diluted to a ridiculous thinness, and meat had wholly disappeared.
So intense became the craving for animal food, that one day when
Lieutenant Boisseux--the Commandant--strolled into the camp with his
beloved white bull-terrier, which was as fat as a Cheshire pig, the
latter was decoyed into a tent, a blanket thrown over him, his throat
cut within a rod of where his master was standing, and he was then
skinned, cut up, cooked, and furnished a savory meal to many hungry men.
When Boisseux learned of the fate of his four-footed friend he was, of
course, intensely enraged, but that was all the good it did him. The
only revenge possible was to sentence more prisoners to ride the cruel
wooden horse which he used as a means of punishment.
Four of our company were already dead. Jacob Lowry and John Beach were
standing near the gate one day when some one snatched the guard’s
blanket from the post where he had hung it, and ran. The enraged
sentry leveled his gun and fired into the crowd. The balls passed
through Lowry’s and Beach’s breasts. Then Charley Osgood, son of our
Lieutenant, a quiet, fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and
earnest as his gallant father, sank under the combination of hunger and
cold. One stinging morning he was found stiff and stark, on the hard
ground, his bright, frank blue eyes glazed over in death.
One of the mysteries of our company was a tall, slender, elderly
Scotchman, who appeared on the rolls as William Bradford. What his
past life had been, where he had lived, what his profession, whether
married or single, no one ever knew. He came to us while in Camp of
Instruction near Springfield, Illinois, and seemed to have left all his
past behind him as he crossed the line of sentries around the camp.
He never received any letters, and never wrote any; never asked for a
furlough or pass, and never expressed a wish to be elsewhere than in
camp. He was courteous and pleasant, but very reserved. He interfered
with no one, obeyed orders promptly and without remark, and was always
present for duty. Scrupulously neat in dress, always as clean-shaved as
an old-fashioned gentleman of the world, with manners and conversation
that showed him to have belonged to a refined and polished circle,
he was evidently out of place as a private soldier in a company of
reckless and none-too-refined young Illinois troopers, but he never
availed himself of any of the numerous opportunities offered to change
his associations. His elegant penmanship would have secured him an easy
berth and better society at headquarters, but he declined to accept a
detail. He became an exciting mystery to a knot of us imaginative young
cubs, who sorted up out of the reminiscential rag-bag of high colors
and strong contrasts with which the sensational literature that we
most affected had plentifully stored our minds, a half-dozen intensely
emotional careers for him. We spent much time in mentally trying these
on, and discussing which fitted him best. We were always expecting
a denouement that would come like a lightning flash and reveal his
whole mysterious past, showing him to have been the disinherited scion
of some noble house, a man of high station, who was expiating some
fearful crime; an accomplished villain eluding his pursuers--in short,
a Somebody who would be a fitting hero for Miss Braddon’s or Wilkie
Collins’s literary purposes. We never got but two clues of his past,
and they were faint ones. One day, he left lying near me a small copy
of “Paradise Lost,” that he always carried with him. Turning over its
leaves I found all of Milton’s bitter invectives against women heavily
underscored. Another time, while on guard with him, he spent much of
his time in writing some Latin verses in very elegant chirography
upon the white painted boards of a fence along which his beat ran. We
pressed in all the available knowledge of Latin about camp, and found
that the tenor of the verses was very uncomplimentary to that charming
sex which does us the honor of being our mothers and sweethearts.
These evidences we accepted as sufficient demonstration that there was
a woman at the bottom of the mystery, and made us more impatient for
further developments. These were never to come. Bradford pined away an
Belle Isle, and grew weaker, but no less reserved, each day. At length,
one bitter cold night ended it all. He was found in the morning stone
dead, with his iron-gray hair frozen fast to the ground, upon which he
lay. Our mystery had to remain unsolved. There was nothing about his
person to give any hint as to his past.