them away and borrow guns and belts from other soldiers
to do guard duty with. These received the appellation of "orderly
buckers" by their comrades, and were too lazy to walk post and perform a
soldier's duty. Duty on the transport in returning to the United States
was very hard on those soldiers who were well. Almost every soldier was
on the sick report, and called by the soldiers the sick battalion. The
few who were put on duty had it to perform every other night. I was one
of the latter, and I considered it pretty tough too. Cooks on the
transports were assigned for one year to cook for the soldiers. They
were as filthy as hogs with everything they cooked. They cared nothing
about how the rations were prepared nor how nasty they were, just so the
cooking was over with as quickly as possible. They had no sympathy;
anything seemed to the cooks good enough if it did not poison him. On
our return we had plenty to eat if it had been cooked decently so that
men could eat it. The reader may say that it should have been reported
to the officer in command. This was done, and reported also to the
officer of the day, and the next day after the reports were made we were
given cabbage for dinner, and every man founds big worms in his plate of
cabbage. While the officer of the day was passing by one soldier had the
nerve to show him what was on his plate; immediately the officer of the
day went to the cooks about it and that seemed to end it. One soldier
found something in his plate that looked almost like a tarantula.

Some of the officers and a great many privates had a monkey apiece.
Great care was taken of them by their owners. Two large monkeys belonged
to some of the crew. These and the smaller ones had the whole vessel to
run through and nothing escaped them--they were into everything. Finally
the commanding officer gave orders for all the monkeys to be taken up,
but the order was not carried out and he had the doctor chloroform the
two large ones and throw them overboard. That made the crew very mad and
sounded the death knell to all the monkeys on board.

That night the crew very quietly caught every monkey and threw them
overboard--not one escaped. It was then the officers' turn to be mad and
they did everything they could to learn who destroyed their monkeys. One
old captain who had lost a monkey offered a reward of ten dollars to
know who threw his monkey overboard, but he failed to find out who it
was. I never heard