laxed and their vitality partially impaired, during the early period
of camp life, when they were just foregoing their old habits and were
not yet hardened to the new, or it may be that when men are congregated
in great numbers, certain diseases, by transmission from one to another,
may be cultivated into extraordinary malignancy--at any rate a large
proportion of the inmates of every camp sickened and many died. At
Bowlinggreen in the winter of 1861 and 1862, the mortality was dreadful,
measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia and diseases of the bowels, carried
off a host of victims--every sickness, however, seemed fatal at that
time.

There was, consequently, a great and constantly increasing need of
medicines; and, perhaps, some waste of them, when they were collected in
large quantities and shipped from point to point, was unavoidable. But
all these problems, all the difficulties of properly supplying the army,
began to be solved and modified, as the genius of adaptation and
substitution was developed among the troops themselves. If a man could
not get a blanket, he made an old carpet, cut to the proper size and
lined on one side with a piece of strong cotton cloth, serve him
instead. The soldier who lacked shoes bid defiance to the rough roads,
or the weather, in a pair of ox-hide buskins, or with complicated
wrappings of rags about his feet. I have known more than one orderly
sergeant make out his morning report upon a shingle, and the surgeon who
lacked a tourniquet used a twisted handkerchief. Of the most necessary
military material, arms and ordnance stores, there was the greatest
scarcity. Perhaps one half of the entire western army (of all the troops
in the department) were armed (at the time that General Johnson came)
with shot-guns and squirrel rifles, and the majority of the other half
with scarcely as serviceable flint-lock muskets.

The troops under General Bragg at Pensacola were perhaps better armed,
but the rule held good with regard to the others. A few companies
composed of young men from the cities, and of rich planters, were armed
with fancy guns, Maynard rifles, etc., altogether unsuitable for the
armament of infantry. In September of 1861, there were probably not one
thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles in the army which General
Johnson was trying to concentrate in Kentucky, and it was several months
later before these unequaled weapons (the right arms for soldiers who
mean to fight) could be supp