all cases, however, in which neither the railways nor the rivers
could be used to supply them, troops were compelled to depend for
subsistence, in a great measure, upon the country immediately about
their cantonments, and as they exhausted the surplus provisions in
different neighborhoods, they would shift their encampments. This was
owing to the great lack of wheel transportation. It was very difficult
to procure wagons, except by purchase or impressment from the citizens,
and those so gotten were of course inferior. Much less inconvenience was
subsequently experienced on this score, after they began to be
manufactured in the Confederate and were captured in great numbers from
the enemy. At this time, many articles such as sugar, coffee, etc.,
indispensable to the comfort and conducive to the health of troops in
the field, were plentifully furnished--after the first year of the war
they were known among us only by camp-fire traditions. The men rarely
suffered, then, from the want of clothing, blankets, shoes, etc., even
when the quartermasters could not furnish them, for they could obtain
them from home, or purchase them, wherever they happened to be
quartered, at reasonable prices. There was, perhaps, no regiment in the
army which had not its full complement of tents; they were manufactured
at Memphis, and other points, in numbers adequate to the wants of all
the troops.

Cooking utensils, also, could be had in abundance--the marching commands
suffered, not from the want of them, but from the lack of transportation
for them. It is true that those which were furnished us were not of the
kind and pattern which experience has prescribed as most fitting for
military use, but they were capital substitutes for flat stones and
forked twigs.

In the medical department there was an almost total lack of the
necessary material. The supply of medicines in the South at the outbreak
of the war was barely sufficient for the wants of the population at that
time. Some medicines were run through the blockade from the North, in
small quantities, during the spring and summer of 1861. But the supply
thus obtained by no means met the demand. The volunteers collected
together in camps and crowded cantonments, subjected to a sudden change
of diet and mode of living, sickened in great numbers. Diseases which
had never before, or but in rare instances, proven dangerous, now
assumed alarming types. The systems of the patients may have been
re