rant, incompetent and unfeeling fanatic, Dr. Knowles. Any other surgeon would have sent Major Hanvey and myself South, as neither of us will be fit for active service in months, if ever again. Knowles will send only those who have lost an arm or leg, fearing the others, if allowed to breathe once more their free Southern air, may recover too speedily, and soon return with fresh ardor to their places in the Confederate army. Instead of being treated with the generous kindness due brave men, wounded and captured in honorable battle, we are talked to and treated as if we were criminals, and our minds, instead of having their asperities softened by magnanimity, are actually daily hardened and steeled against our uncharitable, harsh and cruel captors. It is an unnatural and diabolical policy to keep in durance vile sick and wounded prisoners, who are unable to injure their enemies, or serve their friends, for months, perhaps years, when, by exchanging for an equal number of their own disabled men in Southern prisons, they could diminish greatly the number of deaths, and alleviate a vast deal of unnecessary suffering, both physical and mental. There is intense and grievous disappointment felt at only one of thirty officers being chosen for exchange.
October 27th—Wrote a long letter by Private Watkins of Fourteenth North Carolina, to my sister in La Grange, Georgia. He promised to conceal it until he can mail it on his arrival at Savannah. Few letters by flag of truce are ever forwarded.
October 28th—After eating my meagre breakfast, and lying down, discouraged and troubled at my failure to be sent off for exchange, I gave myself up to unpleasant thoughts of the unpromising and gloomy future before me. While thus ruminating, I saw the matron of the hospital, a large, rough-faced woman, walking slowly up the centre of the ward, glancing from right to left at the wounded men lying disconsolate on their bunks, and stopping as she reached mine. She approached me and said: "You are looking pale, and I guess have been right badly hurt." I replied that I suffered a good deal, and needed more to eat than was furnished me; to which she said, "I guess you get all you are entitled to." Soon after, she proposed to cheer me up by singing to me, to which I readily assented. To my surprise and amusement, she began the well known, thread-bare Yankee song, "Rally round the Flag, Boys, Rally round the Flag." Its inappropriateness didn't seem to strike her, until, at the close of the first stanza, I mildly suggested that the song suited Union soldiers, and not unrepentant "Rebels" like
