l can tell. All that I know is we left a trail of dead
behind us, wherever we moved, so long as I was with the doleful caravan.

Looking back, after these lapse of years, the most salient characteristic
seems to be the ease with which men died. There, was little of the
violence of dissolution so common at Andersonville. The machinery of
life in all of us, was running slowly and feebly; it would simply grow
still slower and feebler in some, and then stop without a jar, without a
sensation to manifest it. Nightly one of two or three comrades sleeping
together would die. The survivors would not know it until they tried to
get him to "spoon" over, when they would find him rigid and motionless.
As they could not spare even so little heat as was still contained in his
body, they would not remove this, but lie up the closer to it until
morning. Such a thing as a boy making an outcry when he discovered his
comrade dead, or manifesting any, desire to get away from the corpse, was
unknown.

I remember one who, as Charles II. said of himself, was
--"an unconscionable long time in dying." His name was Bickford; he
belonged to the Twenty-First Ohio Volunteer Infantry, lived, I think,
near Findlay, O., and was in my hundred. His partner and he were both in
a very bad condition, and I was not surprised, on making my rounds, one
morning, to find them apparently quite dead. I called help, and took his
partner away to the gate. When we picked up Bickford we found he still
lived, and had strength enough to gasp out:

"You fellers had better let me alone." We laid him back to die, as we
supposed, in an hour or so.

When the Rebel Surgeon came in on his rounds, I showed him Bickford,
lying there with his eyes closed, and limbs motionless. The Surgeon
said:

"O, that man's dead; why don't you have him taken out?"

I replied: "No, he isn't. Just see." Stooping, I shook the boy
sharply, and said:

"Bickford! Bickford!! How do you feel?"

The eyes did not unclose, but the lips opened slowly, and said with a
painful effort:

"F-i-r-s-t R-a-t-e!"

This scene was repeated every morning for over a week. Every day the
Rebel Surgeon would insist that the man should betaken out, and every
morning Bickford would gasp out with troublesome exertion that he felt:

"F-i-r-s-t R-a-t-e!"

It ended one morning by his inability, to make his usual answer, and then
he was carried out to join the two score others being loaded int