of supplies and it became a necessity to do away with everything that could be dispensed with. So our regimental teams were reduced from thirteen to three for a time. Then all teams except one to a regiment and the ambulances were reduced in numbers and put into a brigade ambulance train. On the march each man had to carry three days' rations, gun, accoutrements, forty rounds of ammunition, haversack, canteen, blanket, if in winter, overcoats and change of underwear. Of necessity our company messes were broken up and messes were composed of two to four men except in some instances some mean cuss no one cared to be with, then his mess was confined to one. A few facts and figures clipped from the Blandinsville Star will not be out of place here and will enable the reader to form a better idea of what the Civil war meant to our nation. =Don't Belittle the Civil War.= Blandinsville Star: We think of the present war as the most terrible experience of humanity, and are apt to think of our present sacrifices as something unheard of before. But any of our old veterans who went through the civil war know that measured by any standpoint--cost, men engaged, casualties, property loss, or general awfulness the civil war was enormously more costly and terrible to America than this war was or could have become if it had lasted for several years. In fact we have only had a mere taste, a faint suggestion of what the men and women of the '60s went through. The world war has cost us eighteen billion dollars. The civil war cost us $5,160,000,000. The amount of wealth now in the country is fifteen times what it was in 1860. Had the cost mounted up to 77 billion we might begin to feel it pinch as they did. We should have to spend sixty billion more before we should make the money sacrifice they did. The lives lost in the civil war was in round numbers 600,000. The population was then 27,400,000--about one-fourth of what it is now. Four times 600,000 is 2,400,000. If every soldier sent over seas were killed we should have a smaller proportion of gold stars by a quarter of a million than they did. Out of a population of 27,400,000 there were mustered in during the '60s 3,730,000. Multiplying again by four we get 14,920,000. If we had kept on sending two million a year to France for six more years to come we would begin to feel the drain on our male population here at home as they did in 1865. And this takes no account of the billions of dollars' worth of property destroyed and the disruption of business in nearly half our territory. In this war we have faced nothing of this kind.