In that case,
every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and
shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets,
looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching
the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about
what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that
they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the
verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and
odds and ends of one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn't; they
had IRON litter. Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments
and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of
monument in his front yard - a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left;
glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out.
Windows of the houses vacant - looked like eye-holes in a skull. WHOLE
panes were as scarce as news.
'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye
pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody
sit quiet - no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then - and all the more so
on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead;
and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer
combination - along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had
an accident - the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was
just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while,
and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; 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.
