g he was in for a
rough-and-tumble fight, had a bowie knife and a revolver swung to his
belt.

"Those Arkansas and Texas fellows have got knives that would make a
Malay's blood run cold."

"Well, they'll do to hew firewood and cut meat," laughed Morgan.

The troops were not only badly armed. On his tour, Hunt had seen men
making blankets of pieces of old carpet, lined on one side with a piece
of cotton cloth; men wearing ox-hide buskins, or complicated wrapping
of rags, for shoes; orderly sergeants making out reports on shingles;
surgeon using a twisted handkerchief instead of a tourniquet. There was
a total lack of medicine, and camp diseases were already breaking
out--measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia, bowel troubles--each fatal, it
seemed, in time of war.

"General Johnston has asked Richmond for a stand of thirty thousand
arms," Morgan had mused, and Hunt looked up inquiringly.

"Mr. Davis can only spare a thousand."

"That's lucky," said Hunt, grimly.

And then the military organization of that army, so characteristic of
the Southerner! An officer who wanted to be more than a colonel, and
couldn't be a brigadier, would have a "legion"--a hybrid unit between a
regiment and a brigade. Sometimes there was a regiment whose roll-call
was more than two thousand men, so popular was its colonel. Companies
would often refuse to designate themselves by letter, but by the
thrilling titles they had given themselves. How Morgan and Hunt had
laughed over "The Yellow Jackets," "The Dead Shots," "The Earthquakes,"
"The Chickasha Desperadoes," and "The Hell Roarers"! Regiments would
bear the names of their commanders--a singular instance of the
Southerner's passion for individuality, as a man, a company, a
regiment, or a brigade. And there was little or no discipline, as the
word is understood among the military elect, and with no army that the
world has ever seen, Richard Hunt always claimed, was there so little
need of it. For Southern soldiers, he argued, were, from the start,
obedient, zealous, and tolerably patient, from good sense and a strong
sense of duty. They were born fighters; a spirit of emulation induced
them to learn the drill; pride and patriotism kept them true and
patient to the last, but they could not be made, by punishment or the
fear of it, into machines. They read their chance of success, not in
opposing numbers, but in the character and reputation of their
commanders, who, in turn, believed, as a ru