Around the prison walls shambled the guards, blanketed like Indians, and with faces and hearts of wolves.  Other Rebels—­also clad in dingy butternut—­slouched around lazily, crouched over diminutive fires, and talked idle gossip in the broadest of “nigger” dialect.  Officers swelled and strutted hither and thither, and negro servants loitered around, striving to spread the least amount of work over the greatest amount of time.

While I stood gazing in gloomy silence at the depressing surroundings Andrews, less speculative and more practical, saw a good-sized pine stump near by, which had so much of the earth washed away from it that it looked as if it could be readily pulled up.  We had had bitter experience in other prisons as to the value of wood, and Andrews reasoned that as we would be likely to have a repetition of this in the Stockade we were about to enter, we should make an effort to secure the stump.  We both attacked it, and after a great deal of hard work, succeeded in uprooting it.  It was very lucky that we did, since it was the greatest help in preserving our lives through the three long months that we remained at Florence.

While we were arranging our stump so as to carry it to the best advantage, a vulgar-faced man, with fiery red hair, and wearing on his collar the yellow bars of a Lieutenant, approached.  This was Lieutenant Barrett, commandant of the interior of the prison, and a more inhuman wretch even than Captain Wirz, because he had a little more brains than the commandant at Andersonville, and this extra intellect was wholly devoted to cruelty.  As he came near he commanded, in loud, brutal tones: 

“Attention, Prisoners!”

We all stood up and fell in in two ranks.  Said he: 

“By companies, right wheel, march!”

This was simply preposterous.  As every soldier knows, wheeling by companies is one of the most difficult of manuvers, and requires some preparation of a battalion before attempting to execute it.  Our thousand was made up of infantry, cavalry and artillery, representing, perhaps, one hundred different regiments.  We had not been divided off into companies, and were encumbered with blankets, tents, cooking utensils, wood, etc., which prevented our moving with such freedom as to make a company wheel, even had we been divided up into companies and drilled for the maneuver.  The attempt to obey the command was, of course, a ludicrous failure.  The Rebel officers standing near Barrett laughed openly at his stupidity in giving such an order, but he was furious.  He hurled at us a torrent of the vilest abuse the corrupt imagination of man can conceive, and swore until he was fairly black in the face.  He fired his revolver off over our heads, and shrieked and shouted until he had to stop from sheer exhaustion.  Another officer took command then, and marched us into prison.