Our water closet
consisted of a wooden pail in one corner of the room, which was twice a
day carried out and emptied by the guard; as we were none of us allowed to
leave the room for any purpose. The intolerable stench from this pail, and
the filthy slops around it, was enough to create an epidemic.

The atmosphere of the room was simply insufferable, and we were obliged to
keep the windows raised, notwithstanding the cold weather, in order to get
ventilation. We had one old stove in the room, but our supply of wood was
quite insufficient to keep the temperature anything like comfortable,
although the village was surrounded by good timber.

One intensely cold night our wood had given out, and so I took the large
iron poker and commenced prying off the wainscoting of the room for fuel,
and by morning I had completely stripped one side. That morning when the
Sergeant came in he raised a great row about it, threatening to punish the
one who had done it. I told him that I was the one, and that I had
considered it a military necessity, and that if we were not furnished
with wood, he would wake up some morning and find the old jail burned
down. He said I should be reported and punished for destroying government
property, but the only thing done was to give us thereafter a more liberal
supply of fuel.

We occupied a front room in the north-west corner of the jail, and in the
room back of us were twenty-nine more reb deserters and a large, powerful
negro, who had been placed there by his master as a punishment for some
alleged misdemeanor. There was only a board partition between the two
rooms, and it was not long before I had established communication with our
neighbors, by cutting a hole through the partition large enough to allow
us to carry on conversation. Upon our entrance into the jail they had
deprived us of our case knives that we had carried with us thus far, for
fear we would cut our way out with them.

But I had a screw driver to a gun which they happened to overlook in their
search. This I sharpened on the bricks on which the stove rested, and then
commenced making an outlet for our escape. I took a strong cord, and
lashed the screw driver to a round stick of stove wood, and at night
removed one of the sick men, and commenced by punching across two boards
in the floor just over the joist, to cut through the floor. It was hard
work, but by spelling each other, we had the two boards completely loose
before midnigh