Chapter VII: On the Rapidan

I found my boys in a comfortable cabin, ten of them in my cousin’s mess. He was just recovering from a wound received at Brandy Station. I was considered as a guest of the boys, and did not have to go through any drudgery such as cooking or washing. However, I was detailed on picket duty, and occasionally on drill. When I reached the camp, rations consisted of middling meat and corn bread, without any salt. We got along without salt as long as the middling meat lasted, as that was quite salty. By the 1st of May the meat was gone, and many of the soldiers were without shoes. When the meat gave out, we resorted to wild onions, which were plentiful in that section, but hard to dig up. They were about the size of shallots, but very deep rooted, and we had to dig pretty deep with bayonets to get them up. These onions and corn bread without salt did very well toward appeasing the appetite of hungry soldiers.

One day I was on picket duty near the Rapidan River, which is a stream a little larger than Duck River in Tennessee; just opposite us were the Yankee pickets. One of them yelled out: “Hello, Johnny Reb! how is sassafras tea to-day?” I told him the tea was all right, but we had no sugar. I asked him how he was fixed for tobacco, and he said, “Very short”; so we arranged on the morrow to get on duty again. I was to bring a plug of tobacco, and he a shot pouch of coffee. The Federals had their coffee parched, ground, and sugar mixed with it; so on the morrow we made the exchange, and I don’t think that I ever enjoyed coffee as much as I did that, having been months without a taste of pure coffee. After making the exchange, he asked me how I would like to have a New York _Herald_. He said that it was not contraband, for it was several weeks old. I told him that I would like very much to see it, as we did not get any papers now, and the ones received were printed on the reverse side of wall paper and were so flimsy that they would not stand the mails. So he tied the _Herald_ to a stick and threw it across to me. When I opened it up, I read as follows: “_The Rebel Capital Must be Captured at All Hazards; General Grant Has Been Appointed to the Task_.” He afterwards uttered what became a memorable saying: “I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”