Another removal-Sherman’s advance scares the rebels into running us away from Millen-we are taken to Savannah, and thence down the Atlantic & Gulf road to Blackshear

One night, toward the last of November, there was a general alarm around the prison.  A gun was fired from the Fort, the long-roll was beaten in the various camps of the guards, and the regiments answered by getting under arms in haste, and forming near the prison gates.

The reason for this, which we did not learn until weeks later, was that Sherman, who had cut loose from Atlanta and started on his famous March to the Sea, had taken such a course as rendered it probable that Millen was one of his objective points.  It was, therefore, necessary that we should be hurried away with all possible speed.  As we had had no news from Sherman since the end of the Atlanta campaign, and were ignorant of his having begun his great raid, we were at an utter loss to account for the commotion among our keepers.

About 3 o’clock in the morning the Rebel Sergeants, who called the roll, came in and ordered us to turn out immediately and get ready to move.

The morning was one of the most cheerless I ever knew.  A cold rain poured relentlessly down upon us half-naked, shivering wretches, as we groped around in the darkness for our pitiful little belongings of rags and cooking utensils, and huddled together in groups, urged on continually by the curses and abuse of the Rebel officers sent in to get us ready to move.

Though roused at 3 o’clock, the cars were not ready to receive us till nearly noon.  In the meantime we stood in ranks-numb, trembling, and heart-sick.  The guards around us crouched over fires, and shielded themselves as best they could with blankets and bits of tent cloth.  We had nothing to build fires with, and were not allowed to approach those of the guards.

Around us everywhere was the dull, cold, gray, hopeless desolation of the approach of minter.  The hard, wiry grass that thinly covered the once and sand, the occasional stunted weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish undergrowth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some great iceberg; the tall, naked pines moaned and shivered; dead, sapless leaves fell wearily to the sodden earth, like withered hopes drifting down to deepen some Slough of Despond.

Scores of our crowd found this the culmination of their misery.  They laid down upon the ground and yielded to death as s welcome relief, and we left them lying there unburied when we moved to the cars.

As we passed through the Rebel camp at dawn, on our way to the cars, Andrews and I noticed a nest of four large, bright, new tin pans-a rare thing in the Confederacy at that time.  We managed to snatch them without the guard’s attention being attracted, and in an instant had them wrapped up in our blanket.  But the blanket was full of holes, and in spite of all our efforts, it would slip at the most inconvenient times, so as to show a broad glare of the bright metal, just when it seemed it could not help attracting the attention of the guards or their officers.  A dozen times at least we were on the imminent brink of detection, but we finally got our treasures safely to the cars, and sat down upon them.

The cars were open flats.  The rain still beat down unrelentingly.  Andrews and I huddled ourselves together so as to make our bodies afford as much heat as possible, pulled our faithful old overcoat around us as far as it would go, and endured the inclemency as best we could.

Our train headed back to Savannah, and again our hearts warmed up with hopes of exchange.  It seemed as if there could be no other purpose of taking us out of a prison so recently established and at such cost as Millen.

As we approached the coast the rain ceased, but a piercing cold wind set in, that threatened to convert our soaked rags into icicles.

Very many died on the way.  When we arrived at Savannah almost, if not quite, every car had upon it one whom hunger no longer gnawed or disease wasted; whom cold had pinched for the last time, and for whom the golden portals of the Beyond had opened for an exchange that neither Davis nor his despicable tool, Winder, could control.

We did not sentimentalize over these.  We could not mourn; the thousands that we had seen pass away made that emotion hackneyed and wearisome; with the death of some friend and comrade as regularly an event of each day as roll call and drawing rations, the sentiment of grief had become nearly obsolete.  We were not hardened; we had simply come to look upon death as commonplace and ordinary.  To have had no one dead or dying around us would have been regarded as singular.

Besides, why should we feel any regret at the passing away of those whose condition would probably be bettered thereby!  It was difficult to see where we who still lived were any better off than they who were gone before and now “forever at peace, each in his windowless palace of rest.”  If imprisonment was to continue only another month, we would rather be with them.

Arriving at Savannah, we were ordered off the cars.  A squad from each car carried the dead to a designated spot, and land them in a row, composing their limbs as well as possible, but giving no other funeral rites, not even making a record of their names and regiments.  Negro laborers came along afterwards, with carts, took the bodies to some vacant ground, and sunk them out of sight in the sand.

We were given a few crackers each-the same rude imitation of “hard tack” that had been served out to us when we arrived at Savannah the first time, and then were marched over and put upon a train on the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad, running from Savannah along the sea coast towards Florida.  What this meant we had little conception, but hope, which sprang eternal in the prisoner’s breast, whispered that perhaps it was exchange; that there was some difficulty about our vessels coming to Savannah, and we were being taken to some other more convenient sea port; probably to Florida, to deliver us to our folks there.  We satisfied ourselves that we were running along the sea coast by tasting the water in the streams we crossed, whenever we could get an opportunity to dip up some.  As long as the water tasted salty we knew we were near the sea, and hope burned brightly.

The truth was-as we afterwards learned-the Rebels were terribly puzzled what to do with us.  We were brought to Savannah, but that did not solve the problem; and we were sent down the Atlantic & Gulf road as a temporary expedient.

The railroad was the worst of the many bad ones which it was my fortune to ride upon in my excursions while a guest of the Southern Confederacy.  It had run down until it had nearly reached the worn-out condition of that Western road, of which an employee of a rival route once said, “that all there was left of it now was two streaks of rust and the right of way.”  As it was one of the non-essential roads to the Southern Confederacy, it was stripped of the best of its rolling-stock and machinery to supply the other more important lines.

I have before mentioned the scarcity of grease in the South, and the difficulty of supplying the railroads with lubricants.  Apparently there had been no oil on the Atlantic & Gulf since the beginning of the war, and the screeches of the dry axles revolving in the worn-out boxes were agonizing.  Some thing would break on the cars or blow out on the engine every few miles, necessitating a long stop for repairs.  Then there was no supply of fuel along the line.  When the engine ran out of wood it would halt, and a couple of negros riding on the tender would assail a panel of fence or a fallen tree with their axes, and after an hour or such matter of hard chopping, would pile sufficient wood upon the tender to enable us to renew our journey.

Frequently the engine stopped as if from sheer fatigue or inanition.  The Rebel officers tried to get us to assist it up the grade by dismounting and pushing behind.  We respectfully, but firmly, declined.  We were gentlemen of leisure, we said, and decidedly averse to manual labor; we had been invited on this excursion by Mr. Jeff.  Davis and his friends, who set themselves up as our entertainers, and it would be a gross breach of hospitality to reflect upon our hosts by working our passage.  If this was insisted upon, we should certainly not visit them again.  Besides, it made no difference to us whether the train got along or not.  We were not losing anything by the delay; we were not anxious to go anywhere.  One part of the Southern Confederacy was just as good as another to us.  So not a finger could they persuade any of us to raise to help along the journey.

The country we were traversing was sterile and poor-worse even than that in the neighborhood of Andersonville.  Farms and farmhouses were scarce, and of towns there were none.  Not even a collection of houses big enough to justify a blacksmith shop or a store appeared along the whole route.  But few fields of any kind were seen, and nowhere was there a farm which gave evidence of a determined effort on the part of its occupants to till the soil and to improve their condition.

When the train stopped for wood, or for repairs, or from exhaustion, we were allowed to descend from the cars and stretch our numbed limbs.  It did us good in other ways, too.  It seemed almost happiness to be outside of those cursed Stockades, to rest our eyes by looking away through the woods, and seeing birds and animals that were free.  They must be happy, because to us to be free once more was the summit of earthly happiness.

There was a chance, too, to pick up something green to eat, and we were famishing for this.  The scurvy still lingered in our systems, and we were hungry for an antidote.  A plant grew rather plentifully along the track that looked very much as I imagine a palm leaf fan does in its green state.  The leaf was not so large as an ordinary palm leaf fan, and came directly out of the ground.  The natives called it “bull-grass,” but anything more unlike grass I never saw, so we rejected that nomenclature, and dubbed them “green fans.”  They were very hard to pull up, it being usually as much as the strongest of us could do to draw them out of the ground.  When pulled up there was found the smallest bit of a stock-not as much as a joint of one’s little finger-that was eatable.  It had no particular taste, and probably little nutriment, still it was fresh and green, and we strained our weak muscles and enfeebled sinews at every opportunity, endeavoring to pull up a “green fan.”

At one place where we stopped there was a makeshift of a garden, one of those sorry “truck patches,” which do poor duty about Southern cabins for the kitchen gardens of the Northern, farmers, and produce a few coarse cow peas, a scanty lot of collards (a coarse kind of cabbage, with a stalk about a yard long) and some onions to vary the usual side-meat and corn pone, diet of the Georgia “cracker.”  Scanning the patch’s ruins of vine and stalk, Andrews espied a handful of onions, which had; remained ungathered.  They tempted him as the apple did Eve.  Without stopping to communicate his intention to me, he sprang from the car, snatched the onions from their bed, pulled up, half a dozen collard stalks and was on his way back before the guard could make up his mind to fire upon him.  The swiftness of his motions saved his life, for had he been more deliberate the guard would have concluded he was trying to, escape, and shot him down.  As it was he was returning back before the guard could get his gun up.  The onions he had, secured were to us more delicious than wine upon the lees.  They seemed to find their way into every fiber of our bodies, and invigorate every organ.  The collard stalks he had snatched up, in the expectation of finding in them something resembling the nutritious “heart” that we remembered as children, seeking and, finding in the stalks of cabbage.  But we were disappointed.  The stalks were as dry and rotten as the bones of Southern, society.  Even hunger could find no meat in them.

After some days of this leisurely journeying toward the South, we halted permanently about eighty-six miles from Savannah.  There was no reason why we should stop there more than any place else where we had been or were likely to go.  It seemed as if the Rebels had simply tired of hauling us, and dumped us, off.  We had another lot of dead, accumulated since we left Savannah, and the scenes at that place were repeated.

The train returned for another load of prisoners.