on the retreat got very short and for once our men were forced to live
off the country. When bivouac was made for the night above Macon, for
the success of our own particular mess, all scattered after "retreat"
roll call in different directions. About midnight they had all come in,
and pots, kettles, ovens, and hot coals were in demand. Henry Donoho
had shelled out about a peck of cornfield beans from the nearly ripe
pods in the fields.

Walter Guild turned up with a long stick across his shoulder, with two
large pumpkins stuck on each end. Ed King and Jim Maxwell each had a
sack of sweet potatoes, grabbled in a field a mile and a half away.

The Rosser boys had corn too hard for roasting, but all right to grate
on an old half canteen grater.

Rube, Aleck Dearing's servant had half a shoat and Jim Bobbett, my own
servant, had two ducks.

Some one owned a big brass kettle, that would hold about half a barrel,
which the wagons hauled, and it was soon on the fire, filled with the
sliced pumpkins, to be stewed down. Some did one thing, and some
another, and by an hour before day, that feast was ready, and several
more along the same lines in the camp. We ate our fill, filled
haversacks, distributed the balance to whoever wanted it and were ready
to move at daylight. I believe that it was the only meal I remember
during the war, where everything was the proceeds of plunder.

We had been pretty close to a famine for a day or two, but this was
surely a feast.

It was all contrary to military law, but soldiers were not going to sit
still and starve, when something to eat could be had out of the fields
for the taking, and the officers could not be expected to sit up nights
to come around and inspect our pots and kettles, and if they did, they
could prove nothing, and so, for the occasion and the recognizing
necessity, nothing was ever said about it. The men were on hand ready
and able to do duty, and the tangle of the crisis was soon straightened
out and our rations coming through the regular channels. From Macon, by
way of Griffin, where a few days were spent in camp and thence to West
Point on the Georgia-Alabama line, where preparations were made to cut
loose from the railroad, and traverse northeast Alabama with Hood's
army to strike for middle Tennessee by way of Decatur and Florence,
west of the mountains. This was now ----, so that we had been months
and days in reaching in a roundabout manner since the fall of Atl