fused. He said
he was intending to build barracks for the prisoners as soon as he could
procure lumber. I presume that he was sincere in this. I asked in vain
for blankets for the men; for tents, but none came till December, and
then but one "Sibley" tent and one "A" tent per hundred prisoners, not
enough for one-third of them.

We procured water from a deep well on the grounds. The supply was so
scanty for the thousands of prisoners that it was always exhausted
before sunrise. Soon after we came the Confederates commenced digging
two new wells. At their rate of progress we reckoned it would take
several months to finish either.

My memorandum book shows that the issue of food daily at Salisbury,
though sometimes partly withheld, was for each prisoner "one half loaf
of soft bread; two, three, four, or five ounces of meat; a gill of
boiled rice, and a little salt." I have no doubt that Major Gee meant to
deal fairly with us; but he was unprepared for the avalanche that had
descended upon him. We are too much in the habit of blaming individual
combatants for severities and cruelties that are inherent in the whole
business of war, either civil or international, and inseparable from it.
Said our Lieut.-Gen. S. M. B. Young at a banquet in Philadelphia, "War
is necessarily cruel; it is kill and burn, and burn and kill, and again
kill and burn." The truth was more bluntly expressed by the British
Rear-Admiral Lord Fisher, now the first sea lord of the British
Admiralty:

Humanizing war? [said he]; you might as well talk of humanizing
hell! When a silly ass got up at the first Hague Peace Conference in
1899, and talked about the "amenities of warfare" and putting your
prisoners' feet in warm water and giving them gruel, my reply, I
regret to say, was considered brutally unfit for publication. As if
war could be "civilized"! If I am in command when war breaks out, I
shall issue as my orders, "The essence of war is violence.
Moderation is imbecility. _Hit first, hit hard, hit everywhere._"

In this light we may view more charitably the slaying, on the 16th of
October at Salisbury, of Second Lieutenant John Davis of the 155th N. Y.
It was a Sunday morning about half-past ten o'clock. One of our fellow
prisoners, Rev. Mr. Emerson, chaplain of a Vermont regiment, had
circulated notice that he would conduct religious services in the open
air between houses number three and four. The officers were b