第91章 Vicksburg During the Trouble(2)

When she was all safe in the cave she fainted.Two or three weeks afterwards,when she was running for the holes,one morning,through a shell-shower,a big shell burst near her,and covered her all over with dirt,and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.

Well,she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again!

Was getting used to things already,you see.We all got so that we could tell a good deal about shells;and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a light shower.Us men would loaf around and talk;and a man would say,'There she goes!'and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it,and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it.

If a shell was bursting close over us,we stopped talking and stood still;--uncomfortable,yes,but it wasn't safe to move.When it let go,we went on talking again,if nobody hurt--maybe saying,'That was a ripper!'or some such commonplace comment before we resumed;or,maybe,we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead.In that case,every fellow just whipped out a sudden,'See you again,gents!'and shoved.

Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets,looking as cheerful as you please,and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells;and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to do,and wait and make certain;and after that they sa'ntered along again,or lit out for shelter,according to the verdict.

Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper,and odds and ends of one sort or another lying around.Ours hadn't;they had IRON litter.

Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood,and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard--a ton of it,sometimes.No glass left;glass couldn't stand such a bombardment;it was all shivered out.

Windows of the houses vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull.

WHOLE panes were as scarce as news.

'We had church Sundays.Not many there,along at first;but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts.I've seen service stop a minute,and everybody sit quiet--no voice heard,pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead;and pretty soon,when a body could be heard,service would go on again.

Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination--along at first.Coming out of church,one morning,we had an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday.

I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while,and saying,'Drop into our cave to-night,after bombardment;we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.'Whiskey,I was going to say,you know,but a shell interrupted.A chunk of it cut the man's arm off,and left it dangling in my hand.And do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my memory,and outlast everything else,little and big,I reckon,is the mean thought I had then?It was 'the whiskey IS SAVED.'And yet,don't you know,it was kind of excusable;because it was as scarce as diamonds,and we had only just that little;never had another taste during the siege.

'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded,and always hot and close.

Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it;no turning-room for anybody;air so foul,sometimes,you couldn't have made a candle burn in it.A child was born in one of those caves one night,Think of that;why,it was like having it born in a trunk.

'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave;and a number of times we had a dozen.Pretty suffocating in there.We always had eight;eight belonged there.Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow,and I don't know what all,got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege.

They all died but three of us within a couple of years.

One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and stopped it up.It was lively times,for a while,digging out.

Some of us came near smothering.After that we made two openings--ought to have thought of it at first.

'Mule meat.No,we only got down to that the last day or two.

Of course it was good;anything is good when you are starving.

This man had kept a diary during--six weeks?No,only the first six days.

The first day,eight close pages;the second,five;the third,one--loosely written;the fourth,three or four lines;a line or two the fifth and sixth days;seventh day,diary abandoned;life in terrific Vicksburg having now become commonplace and matter of course.