176                                HISTORY OF THE SEVENTY-EIGHTH REGIMENT O.V.V.I.

here you are, right on old John Wells' place; hogs, potatoes, corn and fences all gone. I don't find any fault. I expected it all.

           "Jeff Davis and the rest talk about splittin' the Union. Why if South Carolina had gone out by herself, she would have been split in four pieces by this time. Splittin' the Union! Why the State of Georgia is bein' split right through from end to end. It's these rich fellers who are making this war, and keeping their precious bodies out of harm's way. There's John Franklin, went through here the other day, running away from your army. I could have played dominoes on his coat tail. There's my poor brother, sick with small-pox at Macon, working for eleven dollars a month, and hasn't got a cent of the d—n stuff for a year. 'Leven dollars a month, and eleven thousand bullets a minute. I don't believe in it.            "I heard as how they cut down the trees across your road up country, and burnt the bridges; why, (dog bite their hides) one of you Yankees can take up a tree and carry it off, top and all; and there's that bridge you put across the river in less than two hours – they might as well try to stop the Ogeeche as you Yankees. The blasted rascals who burnt this 'ere bridge thought they did a big thing; a natural born fool cut in two had more sense in either end than any of them."

THE PRISONERS' PEN AT MILLEN.

           As mentioned above, this place is five miles above Millen Junction. A space of ground some three hundred feet square, enclosed by a stockade, without any covering whatsoever, was the hole where thousands of our brave soldiers have been confined for many months past. Exposed to heavy dews, the biting frosts, the pelting rains, without so much as a board, or a tent even to protect these poor naked fellows, who were almost always robbed of their clothing when captured. Some of them had adopted a wretched alternative, holes in the ground, into which they crept at times. What wonder that we found the evidence that seven hundred and fifty had died there. From what misery did death release them!

           I can realize it all now, as I could not even when listening to the stories of prisoners who had fled from this hell; escaped the devils in hot pursuit – foiled the keen scent of the track hounds put upon their path. Here is the uselessly cruel pen where my brothers have been tortured with exposure and starvation. God will certainly visit the authors of this crime with his terrible lightening. Jeff Davis knew that the Northern people would see the condition of the victims of Belle Island.

           How fearful must be the treatment of those who are removed far from the hope of exchange. You at the North may not feel the necessity of retaliation, and may continue to clothe warmly, feed plentifully, and comfortable house the rebel prisoners who are happier far than if free with their commands, but you must not expect those who have and those who may endure these agonies, to feel or act with the same extravagance of generosity.

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