The whole matter impressed me queerly.  The only artillery I had ever seen in action were field pieces.  They made an earsplitting crash when they were discharged, and there was likely to be oceans of trouble for everybody in that neighborhood about that time.  I reasoned from this that bigger guns made a proportionally greater amount of noise, and bred an infinitely larger quantity of trouble.  Now I was hearing the giants of the world’s ordnance, and they were not so impressive as a lively battery of three-inch rifles.  Their reports did not threaten to shatter everything, but had a dull resonance, something like that produced by striking an empty barrel with a wooden maul.  Their shells did not come at one in that wildly, ferocious way, with which a missile from a six-pounder convinces every fellow in a long line of battle that he is the identical one it is meant for, but they meandered over in a lazy, leisurely manner, as if time was no object and no person would feel put out at having to wait for them.  Then, the idea of firing every quarter of an hour for a year—­fixing up a job for a lifetime, as Andrews expressed it,—­and of being fired back at for an hour at 9 o’clock every morning and evening; of fifty thousand people going on buying and selling, eating, drinking and sleeping, having dances, drives and balls, marrying and giving in marriage, all within a few hundred yards of where the shells were falling-struck me as a most singular method of conducting warfare.

We received no rations until the day after our arrival, and then they were scanty, though fair in quality.  We were by this time so hungry and faint that we could hardly move.  We did nothing for hours but lie around on the ground and try to forget how famished we were.  At the announcement of rations, many acted as if crazy, and it was all that the Sergeants could do to restrain the impatient mob from tearing the food away and devouring it, when they were trying to divide it out.  Very many—­perhaps thirty—­died during the night and morning.  No blame for this is attached to the Charlestonians.  They distinguished themselves from the citizens of every other place in the Southern Confederacy where we had been, by making efforts to relieve our condition.  They sent quite a quantity of food to us, and the Sisters of Charity came among us, seeking and ministering to the sick.  I believe our experience was the usual one.  The prisoners who passed through Charleston before us all spoke very highly of the kindness shown them by the citizens there.

We remained in Charleston but a few days.  One night we were marched down to a rickety depot, and put aboard a still more rickety train.  When morning came we found ourselves running northward through a pine barren country that resembled somewhat that in Georgia, except that the pine was short-leaved, there was more oak and other hard woods, and the vegetation generally assumed a more Northern look.  We had been put into close box cars, with guards at the doors and on top.  During the night quite a number of the boys, who had fabricated little saws out of case knives and fragments of hoop iron, cut holes through the bottoms of the cars, through which they dropped to the ground and escaped, but were mostly recaptured after several days.  There was no hole cut in our car, and so Andrews and I staid in.