karith and cobra, from which recovery has never been known.
At this time, too, yet another fatal foe appeared in these subterranean ovens, in the form of small-pox, which broke out and spread through the camp. Although sickness is ever to be found in the footsteps of war, the frightful nature of this disease could not but be deplored as a terrible calamity by any force pent up, as we were, like worms under earth, and undergoing manifold trials almost beyond belief. What with the camp having become a lazaretto, for the very air we breathed must have been heavily laden with infection; what with the misery of existing in disease-tainted holes; the excruciating heat, the suffocating dust, the inconceivable swarms of flies; with fever, dysentery, gangrene sores, all simultaneously prevalent in the camp, the contagious disease was helped but too fatally in finding easy victims among us.
In the midst of these horrors and this gloomy state of things, it may be asked how we fared in respect to commissariat provisions. Well, to tell the truth, it was always sheer hunger that forced us to cram them down our throats. Meat particularly was seldom barely better than carrion itself, and sometimes indeed so uninviting to the appetite and eye that one could hardly look at it without holding one’s nose — no facetiousness is here implied — and this, too, be it remembered by all who read this, in times when at any moment our mettle, energy, and biceps were liable to be tested against a desperate and bloodthirsty foe in
