we’ve got hold of a pint of prime wh–.’ Whiskey, I was going to say,
you know, but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man’s arm off,
and left it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is
going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else,
little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was ‘the
whiskey IS SAVED.’ And yet, don’t you know, it was kind of excusable;
because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little;
never had another taste during the siege.
‘Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.
Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it;
no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made
a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night,
Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.
‘Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we
had a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight;
eight belonged there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright
and sorrow, and I don’t know what all, got so loaded into them that
none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege.
They all died but three of us within a couple of years.
One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and
stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out.
Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two openings–
ought to have thought of it at first.
‘Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two.
Of course it was good; anything is good when you are starving.
This man had kept a diary during–six weeks? No, only the first six days.
The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one–
loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth
and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburg
having now become commonplace and matter of course.
The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general
reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety,
full of incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longer
than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases,
both land and water–the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse,
the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine.
The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here.
Over the great gateway is this inscription:–
“HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR
COUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861 TO 1865”
The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide
prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces,
with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way
of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,’ and in one part is a piece of native
wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm.
Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government.
The Government’s work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity,
thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first place,
and then takes care of it.
By winding-roads–which were often cut to so great a depth between
perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels–we drove
out a mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene
of the surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton.
Its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which
so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick
foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It
overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is
not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds.
The battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to
the National Cemetery.
On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us,