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fused. He said he was intending to build barracks for the prisoners as soon as he could procure lumber. I presume that he was sincere in this. I asked in vain for blankets for the men; for tents, but none came till December, and then but one "Sibley" tent and one "A" tent per hundred prisoners, not enough for one-third of them. We procured water from a deep well on the grounds. The supply was so scanty for the thousands of prisoners that it was always exhausted before sunrise. Soon after we came the Confederates commenced digging two new wells. At their rate of progress we reckoned it would take several months to finish either. My memorandum book shows that the issue of food daily at Salisbury, though sometimes partly withheld, was for each prisoner "one half loaf of soft bread; two, three, four, or five ounces of meat; a gill of boiled rice, and a little salt." I have no doubt that Major Gee meant to deal fairly with us; but he was unprepared for the avalanche that had descended upon him. We are too much in the habit of blaming individual combatants for severities and cruelties that are inherent in the whole business of war, either civil or international, and inseparable from it. Said our Lieut.-Gen. S. M. B. Young at a banquet in Philadelphia, "War is necessarily cruel; it is kill and burn, and burn and kill, and again kill and burn." The truth was more bluntly expressed by the British Rear-Admiral Lord Fisher, now the first sea lord of the British Admiralty: Humanizing war? [said he]; you might as well talk of humanizing hell! When a silly ass got up at the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, and talked about the "amenities of warfare" and putting your prisoners' feet in warm water and giving them gruel, my reply, I regret to say, was considered brutally unfit for publication. As if war could be "civilized"! If I am in command when war breaks out, I shall issue as my orders, "The essence of war is violence. Moderation is imbecility. _Hit first, hit hard, hit everywhere._" In this light we may view more charitably the slaying, on the 16th of October at Salisbury, of Second Lieutenant John Davis of the 155th N. Y. It was a Sunday morning about half-past ten o'clock. One of our fellow prisoners, Rev. Mr. Emerson, chaplain of a Vermont regiment, had circulated notice that he would conduct religious services in the open air between houses number three and four. The officers were b
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