baking bread or boiling beef under the hands of the negro
men, who delighted in the work and joke and grin and laugh or jump out
and dance part of a jig, whilst another claps his hands and pats knees
for the music. Occasionally Potts may quietly say to his negro man,
"Jim" I wish you would hand me a cup of water." He keeps his seat,
drinks, hands back the cup and goes on smoking. No man in the army has
a better colored meerschaum. On the march or while the army was in the
trenches, rations are issued, cooked, the bread being baked and the
beef boiled, bacon or salt pork is issued raw, the soldiers eating it
raw, or boiled on coals, if convenient and the meat not too scant. In
permanent camp, the soldiers drew the rations raw or cooked as they
preferred almost always each mess preferred to do its own cooking. With
us confederates, bread was mostly corn pone, sometimes biscuits,
sometimes hard-tack. Cold cornbread or hard-tack crumbled into a tin
can and boiled with perhaps a few scraps of meat was "cush" and "cush"
tasted good, hot off the coals, after a hard day's march or fighting.

The writers opinion is that the word comes from Louisana where now the
Creole French takes his turn of corn to mill and has it ground into
what the American calls "grits," but the Frenchman of Lousiana, calls
it "cous cous."

At one time the Confederate government experimented with a mixture of
cowpea flour and wheat flour, for the making of a nourishing hard tack.
Doubtless it was nourishing enough, when there was plenty of time to
boil them soft enough to eat, but most men's teeth were not able to
grind them. It took a hatchet of ax to break them up and the broken
pieces resembled shiny pieces of flint rock. They were not so great a
success for the soldier on the march as the inventor expected. Every
day some of the officers and men would get permission to go to the top
of the Ridge, visiting friends, in different commands, on the lines
facing Chattanooga, so we kept in touch with what could be seen and
heard of the situation. At the distance, the Yanks could be seen moving
about in Chattanooga like ants in a hill and just about as much could
be told as to what they were doing, as could be told by a man watching
the doings of ants at a distance that will barely allow them to be
distinguished.

Soon after our big dinner, Major Robertson ordered Capt. Lumsden and
one of the other batteries to be ready to march at dusk, taking only
the g