out the
antipathy I had for rice. The French General, Baron Gourgaud, in his
"Talks of Napoleon at St. Helena" (p. 240), records Napoleon as having
said, "Rice is the best food for the soldier." Napoleon, in my opinion,
was the greatest soldier that mankind ever produced,--but all the same,
I emphatically dissent from his rice proposition. His remark may have
been correct when applied to European soldiers of his time and
place,--but I know it wouldn't fit western American boys of 1861-65.

There were a few occasions when an article of diet was issued called
"desiccated potatoes." For "desiccated" the boys promptly substituted
"desecrated," and "desecrated potatoes" was its name among the rank and
file from start to finish. It consisted of Irish potatoes cut up fine
and thoroughly dried. In appearance it much resembled the modern
preparation called "grape nuts." We would mix it in water, grease, and
salt, and make it up into little cakes, which we would fry, and they
were first rate. There was a while when we were at Bolivar, Tennessee,
that some stuff called "compressed vegetables" was issued to us, which
the boys, almost unanimously, considered an awful fraud. It was
composed of all sorts of vegetables, pressed into small bales, in a
solid mass, and as dry as threshed straw. The conglomeration contained
turnip-tops, cabbage leaves, string-beans (pod and all), onion blades,
and possibly some of every other kind of a vegetable that ever grew in
a garden. It came to the army in small boxes, about the size of the
Chinese tea-boxes that were frequently seen in this country about fifty
years ago. In the process of cooking, it would swell up
prodigiously,--a great deal more so than rice. The Germans in the
regiment would make big dishes of soup out of this "baled hay," as we
called it, and they liked it, but the native Americans, after one
trial, wouldn't touch it. I think about the last box of it that was
issued to our company was pitched into a ditch in the rear of the camp,
and it soon got thoroughly soaked and loomed up about as big as a
fair-sized hay-cock. "Split-peas" were issued to us, more or less,
during all the time we were in the service. My understanding was that
they were the ordinary garden peas. They were split in two, dried, and
about as hard as gravel. But they yielded to cooking, made excellent
food, and we were all fond of them. In our opinion, when properly
cooked, they were almost as good as Yankee beans