Andersonville, vol 3 | Page 9

drum. Maryland! She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-- Hnzza! she
spurns the Northern scum! She breathes--she burns! she'll come! she'll
come! Maryland! My Maryland!
"Stonewall Jackson Crossing into Maryland," was another travesty, of
about the same literary merit, or rather demerit, as "The Bonnie Blue
Flag." Its air was that of the well-known and popular negro minstrel
song," Billy Patterson." For all that, it sounded very martial and stirring
when played by a brass band.
We heard these songs with tiresome iteration, daily and nightly, during
our stay in the Southern Confederacy. Some one of the guards seemed
to be perpetually beguiling the weariness of his watch by singing in all
keys, in every sort of a voice, and with the wildest latitude as to air and
time. They became so terribly irritating to us, that to this day the
remembrance of those soul-lacerating lyrics abides with me as one of
the chief of the minor torments of our situation. They were, in fact,

nearly as bad as the lice.
We revenged ourselves as best we could by constructing fearfully
wicked, obscene and insulting parodies on these, and by singing them
with irritating effusiveness in the hearing of the guards who were
inflicting these nuisances upon us.
Of the same nature was the garrison music. One fife, played by an
asthmatic old fellow whose breathings were nearly as audible as his
notes, and one rheumatic drummer, constituted the entire band for the
post. The fifer actually knew but one tune "The Bonnie Blue Flag"--
and did not know that well. But it was all that he had, and he played it
with wearisome monotony for every camp call--five or six times a day,
and seven days in the week. He called us up in the morning with it for a
reveille; he sounded the "roll call" and "drill call," breakfast, dinner and
supper with it, and finally sent us to bed, with the same dreary wail that
had rung in our ears all day. I never hated any piece of music as I came
to hate that threnody of treason. It would have been such a relief if the,
old asthmatic who played it could have been induced to learn another
tune to play on Sundays, and give us one day of rest. He did not, but
desecrated the Lord's Day by playing as vilely as on the rest of the
week. The Rebels were fully conscious of their musical deficiencies,
and made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to induce the musicians
among the prisoners to come outside and form a band.

CHAPTER XLV
AUGUST--NEEDLES STUCK IN PUMPKIN SEEDS--SOME
PHENOMENA OF STARVATION-- RIOTING IN REMEMBERED
LUXURIES.
"Illinoy," said tall, gaunt Jack North, of the One Hundred and
Fourteenth Illinois, to me, one day, as we sat contemplating our naked,
and sadly attenuated underpinning; "what do our legs and feet most
look most like?"
"Give it up, Jack," said I.
"Why--darning needles stuck in pumpkin seeds, of course." I never

heard a better comparison for our wasted limbs.
The effects of the great bodily emaciation were sometimes very
startling. Boys of a fleshy habit would change so in a few weeks as to
lose all resemblance to their former selves, and comrades who came
into prison later would utterly fail to recognize them. Most fat men, as
most large men, died in a little while after entering, though there were
exceptions. One of these was a boy of my own company, named
George Hillicks. George had shot up within a few years to over six feet
in hight, and then, as such boys occasionally do, had, after enlisting
with us, taken on such a development of flesh that we nicknamed him
the "Giant," and he became a pretty good load for even the strongest
horse. George held his flesh through Belle Isle, and the earlier weeks in
Andersonville, but June, July, and August "fetched him," as the boys
said. He seemed to melt away like an icicle on a Spring day, and he
grew so thin that his hight seemed preternatural. We called him
"Flagstaff," and cracked all sorts of jokes about putting an insulator on
his head, and setting him up for a telegraph pole, braiding his legs and
using him for a whip lash, letting his hair grow a little longer, and
trading him off to the Rebels for a sponge and staff for the artillery, etc.
We all expected him to die, and looked continually for the development
of the fatal scurvy symptoms, which were to seal his doom. But he
worried through, and came out at last in good shape, a happy result due
as much as to anything else to his having in Chester Hayward, of
Prairie City, Ill.,--one of the most devoted chums I ever