For my own part life was dear to me but it was dear on account of my friends; and supposing I should take the oath and save my life; the war would soon be over and when peace came and all my comrades had returned to their homes, where would my place be? Could I ever return to my friends with the brand of traitor upon me? Never. I would die, if die I must; but die true to the flag I loved and honored, and for which I had suffered so long. Right here we adopted the prisoners’ motto, “Death, but not dishonor.”
Soon after changing my quarters I succeeded in securing a position on the police force. Another of my tent mates was equally fortunate, so we had a little extra food in our tent. My health had been slowly improving ever since I left Andersonville, and with returning health came a growing appetite. We resorted to all sorts of expedients to increase the supplies of our commissariat. Ole Gilbert was a natural mechanic and he made spoons from some of the tin which he had procured near Macon; these were traded for food or sold for cash, and food purchased with the money. One day he traded three spoons for a pocket knife with an ivory faced handle. The ivory had been broken but I fished the remains of an old ivory fine comb out of my pockets and he repaired the handle of the knife with it. We sent it outside by one of the boys who had a job of grave digging, and who sold it for ten dollars, Confederate money. With this money we bought a bushel of sweet potatoes of the sutler at the gate, and then we resolved to fill up once more before we died. We baked each of us two large corn “flap jacks” eight inches across and half an inch thick. We then boiled a six quart pail full of sweet potatoes and after that made the pail full of coffee out of the bran sifted from our meal, and then scorched. This was equal to three quarts of food and drink to each one of us, but it only stopped the chinks.
I then proposed to double the dose which we did, eating and drinking six quarts each within two hours. Of course it did not burst us but it started the hoops pretty badly, and yet we were hungry after that. It seemed impossible to hold enough to satisfy our hunger; every nerve, and fiber and tissue in our whole system from head to foot, was crying out for food, and our stomachs would not hold enough to supply the demand, and it took months of time and untold quantities of food to get our systems back to normal condition.