d some of the boys carried me out and put me in the vehicle.
Capt. Keeley was standing by; he pressed my hand and said, "Good-by,
Stillwell; brace up! You'll be all right soon." I was feeling too
wretched to talk much; I only said, "Good-by, Captain," and let it go
at that. Later, when I rejoined the regiment, Keeley told me that when
he bade me good-by that morning he never expected to see me again.

Our Division Hospital, to which I was taken, consisted of a little
village of wall tents in the outskirts of Helena. The tents were
arranged in rows, with perhaps from fifteen to twenty in a row, with
their ends pinned back against the sides, thus making an open space
down an entire row. The sick men lay on cots, of which there was a line
on each side of the interior of the tents, with a narrow aisle between.
I remained at the hospital eight days, and was very sick the most of
the time, and retain a distinct recollection of only a few things. But,
aside from men dying all around me, both day and night, nothing
important happened. All the accounts that I have read of this movement
of Gen. Steele's on Little Rock agree in stating that the number of men
he left sick at Helena and other places between there and Little Rock
was extraordinary and beyond all usual proportions. And from what I saw
myself, I think these statements must be true. And a necessary
consequence of this heavy sick list was the fact that it must have been
impossible to give the invalids the care and attention they should have
received. We had but few attendants, and they were soldiers detailed
for that purpose who were too feeble to march, but were supposed to be
capable of rendering hospital service. And the medical force left with
us was so scanty that it was totally inadequate for the duties they
were called on to perform. Oh, those nights were so long! At intervals
in the aisle a bayonet would be stuck in the ground with a lighted
candle in its socket, and when a light went out, say after midnight, it
stayed out, and we would toss around on those hard cots in a state of
semi-darkness until daylight. If any attendants moved around among us
in the later hours of the night I never saw them. We had well-water to
drink, which, of course, was better than that from the river, but it
would soon become insipid and warm, and sometimes, especially during
the night, we didn't have enough of that. On one occasion, about
midnight, soon after I was taken to the hospit