ding about two companies at a
time, the boat being put backwards and forwards by means of a stout
rope, the men pulling with their hands. A blinding sleet was falling,
covering the rope continually with a sheet of ice, almost freezing
the hands of the thinly clad and barefooted soldiers. But there was no
murmuring nor complaint--all were as jolly and good-natured as if on
a picnic excursion. Hardship had become a pleasure and sufferings,
patriotism. There were no sickness, no straggling, nor feelings of
self-constraint.

General Longstreet speaks thus of his army after he had established
his camps and the subsistence trains began to forage in the rich
valleys of the French Broad and Chucky Rivers and along the banks of
Mossy Creek:

"With all the plentitude of provisions, and many things,
which, at the time, seemed luxuries, we were not quite happy.
Tattered blankets, garments, shoes (the later going--some
gone) opened ways on all sides for piercing winter blasts.
There were some hand looms in the country from which we
occasionally picked up a piece of cloth, and here and there we
received other comforts--some from kind, some from unwilling
hands, which could nevertheless spare them. For shoes, we were
obliged to resort to raw-hides, from beef cattle, as temporary
protection from the frozen ground. Then we found soldiers who
could tan the hides of our beeves, some who could make shoes,
some who could make shoe pegs, some who could make shoe lasts,
so that it came about that the hides passed rapidly from the
beeves to the feet of the soldiers in the form of comfortable
shoes."

We took up very comfortable quarters, in the way that comfort goes
with a soldier--cut off from the outside world. Only a few officers
had the old army fly tents; the soldiers were each supplied, or rather
had supplied themselves upon the battlefield of the enemy with small
tent flies, about five by six feet, so arranged with buttons and
button holes that two being buttoned together and stretched over a
pole would make the sides or roof and the third would close the end,
making a tent about six feet long, five feet wide, and four feet high,
in which three or four men could sleep very comfortably. In the bitter
weather great roaring fires were built in front during the night, and
to which the soldier, by long habit, or a kind of intuition, would
stretch his feet, when the cold would b