One morning a new Rebel officer came in to superintend calling the roll.  He was an undersized, fidgety man, with an insignificant face, and a mouth that protruded like a rabbit’s.  His bright little eyes, like those of a squirrel or a rat, assisted in giving his countenance a look of kinship to the family of rodent animals—­a genus which lives by stealth and cunning, subsisting on that which it can steal away from stronger and braver creatures.  He was dressed in a pair of gray trousers, with the other part of his body covered with a calico garment, like that which small boys used to wear, called “waists.”  This was fastened to the pantaloons by buttons, precisely as was the custom with the garments of boys struggling with the orthography of words in two syllables.  Upon his head was perched a little gray cap.  Sticking in his belt, and fastened to his wrist by a strap two or three feet long, was one of those formidable looking, but harmless English revolvers, that have ten barrels around the edge of the cylinder, and fire a musket-bullet from the center.  The wearer of this composite costume, and bearer of this amateur arsenal, stepped nervously about and sputtered volubly in very broken English.  He said to Wry-Necked Smith: 

“Py Gott, you don’t vatch dem dam Yankees glose enough!  Dey are schlippin’ rount, and peatin’ you efery dimes.”

This was Captain Henri Wirz, the new commandant of the interior of the prison.  There has been a great deal of misapprehension of the character of Wirz.  He is usually regarded as a villain of large mental caliber, and with a genius for cruelty.  He was nothing of the kind.  He was simply contemptible, from whatever point of view he was studied.  Gnat-brained, cowardly, and feeble natured, he had not a quality that commanded respect from any one who knew him.  His cruelty did not seem designed so much as the ebullitions of a peevish, snarling little temper, united to a mind incapable of conceiving the results of his acts, or understanding the pain he was Inflicting.

I never heard anything of his profession or vocation before entering the army.  I always believed, however, that he had been a cheap clerk in a small dry-goods store, a third or fourth rate book-keeper, or something similar.  Imagine, if you please, one such, who never had brains or self-command sufficient to control himself, placed in command of thirty-five thousand men.  Being a fool he could not help being an infliction to them, even with the best of intentions, and Wirz was not troubled with good intentions.

I mention the probability of his having been a dry-goods clerk or book-keeper, not with any disrespect to two honorable vocations, but because Wirz had had some training as an accountant, and this was what gave him the place over us.  Rebels, as a rule, are astonishingly ignorant of arithmetic and accounting, generally.  They are good shots, fine horsemen, ready speakers and ardent politicians, but, like all noncommercial people, they flounder hopelessly in what people of this section would consider simple mathematical processes.  One of our constant amusements was in befogging and “beating” those charged with calling rolls and issuing rations.  It was not at all difficult at times to make a hundred men count as a hundred and ten, and so on.