WE LEAVE SAVANNAH--MORE HOPES OF EXCHANGE--SCENES AT DEPARTURE
--“FLANKERS”--ON THE BACK TRACK TOWARD ANDERSONVILLE--ALARM THEREAT
--AT THE PARTING OF TWO WAYS--WE FINALLY BRING UP AT CAMP LAWTON.
On the evening of the 11th of October there came an order for one
thousand prisoners to fall in and march out, for transfer to some other
point.
Of course, Andrews and I “flanked” into this crowd. That was our
usual way of doing. Holding that the chances were strongly in favor
of every movement of prisoners being to our lines, we never failed
to be numbered in the first squad of prisoners that were sent out.
The seductive mirage of “exchange” was always luring us on. It must
come some time, certainly, and it would be most likely to come to
those who were most earnestly searching for it. At all events, we
should leave no means untried to avail ourselves of whatever seeming
chances there might be. There could be no other motive for this move,
we argued, than exchange. The Confederacy was not likely to be at
the trouble and expense of hauling us about the country without some
good reason--something better than a wish to make us acquainted with
Southern scenery and topography. It would hardly take us away from
Savannah so soon after bringing us there for any other purpose than
delivery to our people.
The Rebels encouraged this belief with direct assertions of its truth.
They framed a plausible lie about there having arisen some difficulty
concerning the admission of our vessels past the harbor defenses of
Savannah, which made it necessary to take us elsewhere--probably to
Charleston--for delivery to our men.
Wishes are always the most powerful allies of belief. There is
little difficulty in convincing a man of that of which he wants to
be convinced. We forgot the lie told us when we were taken from
Andersonville, and believed the one which was told us now.
Andrews and I hastily snatched our worldly possessions--our overcoat,
blanket, can, spoon, chessboard and men, yelled to some of our
neighbors that they could have our hitherto much-treasured house, and
running down to the gate, forced ourselves well up to the front of the
crowd that was being assembled to go out.
The usual scenes accompanying the departure of first squads were being
acted tumultuously. Every one in the camp wanted to be one of the
supposed-to-be-favored few, and if not selected at first, tried to
“flank in”--that is, slip into the place of some one else who had had
better luck. This one naturally resisted displacement, ‘vi et armis,’
and the fights would become so general as to cause a resemblance to the
famed Fair of Donnybrook. The cry would go up:
“Look out for flankers!”
The lines of the selected would dress up compactly, and outsiders
trying to force themselves in would get mercilessly pounded.
We finally got out of the pen, and into the cars, which soon rolled
away to the westward. We were packed in too densely to be able to lie
down. We could hardly sit down. Andrews and I took up our position in
one corner, piled our little treasures under us, and trying to lean
against each other in such a way as to afford mutual support and rest,
dozed fitfully through a long, weary night.
When morning came we found ourselves running northwest through a poor,
pine-barren country that strongly resembled that we had traversed in
coming to Savannah. The more we looked at it the more familiar it
became, and soon there was no doubt we were going back to Andersonville.
By noon we had reached Millen--eighty miles from Savannah, and
fifty-three from Augusta. It was the junction of the road leading to
Macon and that running to Augusta. We halted a little while at the “Y,”
and to us the minutes were full of anxiety. If we turned off to the
left we were going back to Andersonville. If we took the right hand
road we were on the way to Charleston or Richmond, with the chances in
favor of exchange.
At length we started, and, to our joy, our engine took the right hand
track. We stopped again, after a run of five miles, in the midst of one
of the open, scattering forests of long leaved pine that I have before
described. We were ordered out of the cars, and marching a few rods,
came in sight of another of those hateful Stockades, which seemed to
be as natural products of the Sterile sand of that dreary land as its
desolate woods and its breed of boy murderers and gray-headed assassins.
Again our hearts sank, and death seemed more welcome than incarceration
in those gloomy wooden walls. We marched despondently up to the gates
of the Prison, and halted while a party of Rebel clerks made a list of
our names, rank, companies, and regiments. As they were Rebels it was
slow work. Reading and writing never came by nature, as Dogberry would
say, to any man fighting for Secession. As a rule, he took to them as
reluctantly as if, he thought them cunning inventions of the Northern
Abolitionist to perplex and demoralize him. What a half-dozen boys
taken out of our own ranks would have done with ease in an hour or so,
these Rebels worried over all of the afternoon, and then their register
of us was so imperfect, badly written and misspelled, that the Yankee
clerks afterwards detailed for the purpose, never could succeed in
reducing it to intelligibility.
We learned that the place at which we had arrived was Camp Lawton, but
we almost always spoke of it as “Millen,” the same as Camp Sumter is
universally known as Andersonville.
Shortly after dark we were turned inside the Stockade. Being the first
that had entered, there was quite a quantity of wood--the offal from
the timber used in constructing the Stockade--lying on the ground. The
night was chilly one we soon had a number of fires blazing. Green pitch
pine, when burned, gives off a peculiar, pungent odor, which is never
forgotten by one who has once smelled it. I first became acquainted
with it on entering Andersonville, and to this day it is the most
powerful remembrance I can have of the opening of that dreadful Iliad
of woes. On my journey to Washington of late years the locomotives
are invariably fed with pitch pine as we near the Capital, and as the
well-remembered smell reaches me, I grow sick at heart with the flood
of saddening recollections indissolubly associated with it.
As our fires blazed up the clinging, penetrating fumes diffused
themselves everywhere. The night was as cool as the one when we arrived
at Andersonville, the earth, meagerly sodded with sparse, hard,
wiry grass, was the same; the same piney breezes blew in from the
surrounding trees, the same dismal owls hooted at us; the same mournful
whip-poor-will lamented, God knows what, in the gathering twilight.
What we both felt in the gloomy recesses of downcast hearts Andrews
expressed as he turned to me with:
“My God, Mc, this looks like Andersonville all over again.”
A cupful of corn meal was issued to each of us. I hunted up some water.
Andrews made a stiff dough, and spread it about half an inch thick on
the back of our chessboard. He propped this up before the fire, and
when the surface was neatly browned over, slipped it off the board
and turned it over to brown the other side similarly. This done, we
divided it carefully between us, swallowed it in silence, spread our
old overcoat on the ground, tucked chess-board, can, and spoon under
far enough to be out of the reach of thieves, adjusted the thin blanket
so as to get the most possible warmth out of it, crawled in close
together, and went to sleep. This, thank Heaven, we could do; we could
still sleep, and Nature had some opportunity to repair the waste of the
day. We slept, and forgot where we were.