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But that didn't last long. It was only a way they had of letting the fresh soldier down easy. Orders came to get ready to pull out after Bragg, and then Si'a regiment had its first issue of army rations. As the Orderly pried open a box of hardtack and began to distribute them to the boys, exclaimed: "Them's nice-looking soda crackers. I don't believe the grub is going to be so bad, after all."
Huh, they said he was a fool and didn't know how to figure. I tell you if he was a fool, Solomon was a idiot. Who was the'r brag man up in Yankeedom? why, Abe Lincoln an' what did he ever do but set back in the White House and tell smutty jokes, while the rest o' the country was walkin' on its uppers, eatin' hardtack, sweatin' blood, an' spittin' out minnie-balls.
What the projector of the trip was really trying to recall was how many times that day he had regretted saving Abe from the devastating clutches of the old ladies. "Him need hardenin'?" muttered Samuel blackly. "Why, he's harder now 'n nails an' hardtack!" Again he ran over on his fingers the list of high crimes and misdemeanors of which Abe had been guilty.
"Not a mouthful of that stuff," said the Surgeon; "but you may eat some of those crackers you have soaked there. Mr. Klegg, let him eat about half of those crackers no more." Shorty looked as if the whole world had lost its charms. "Hardtack without grease's no more taste than chips," he murmured.
IT WAS told in the last chapter how the patriotic impulses of Si Klegg, of the 200th Ind., reached his stomach and digestive apparatus, and brought them under obedient subjection to hardtack.
He brought out the hardtack which Boyd had so indignantly rejected the night before, and holding the chunk balanced on his saddle horn, rapped it smartly with the butt of a revolver. It broke raggedly across, and then he was able to crack it again between his fingers. "Here " He held out a two-inch piece to Boyd, and this time there was no refusal.
Next came thoughts of a wedding-supper for the bride's friends. The Colonel took the view that the large number of recruits which he expected to gain justified him in ordering the Commissary to issue a liberal quantity of rations. Two large iron wash-kettles were scoured out one used to make coffee in and the other to boil meat, while there was sugar and hardtack in abundance.
About the same time Forrest had struck the Mobile and Ohio railroad, on which we depended to bring us from the north our supplies of hardtack and bacon, and had made a wreck of the road from about Jackson, Tennessee, nearly to Columbus, Kentucky.
We were up betimes the next morning after a fair night's sleep on the floor. We again served hardtack and coffee to all, and at five o'clock were once more on our way. A thick mantle of mist obscured the shore, and Hubbard offered Steve a chart and compass. "Ain't got no learnin', sir; I can't read, sir," said the young livyere. So Hubbard directed the course in the mist while Steve steered.
The nation has not gone backward, and all the good deeds did not cease in 1865. The Grand Army of the Republic, speaking plainly but with no sense of egotism, has been praised too much for the war and too little for its heroism and power in peace. Does it make a man an angel to eat hardtack? Or does it educate in inductive philosophy to chase a pig through a Virginia fence?
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