A few days before this, a “fresh fish,” or “tender foot,” as the cow boys would call him nowadays, started to cross the swamp south of my tent. In one place in the softest part of the swamp the railing which composed the Dead-line was gone, this man stepped over where the line should have been, and the guard fired at him but he fired too high and missed his mark, but the bullet struck an Ohio man who was sitting in front of a tent near mine. He was badly, but not fatally wounded, but died in a few days from the effects of gangrene in his wound. The author of “Andersonville” makes a wide distinction between the members of the 29th Alabama and the 55th Georgia regiments, which guarded us, in relation to treatment of prisoners, claiming that Alabama troops were more humane than the Georgia “crackers.” This was undoubtedly true in this instance, but I am of the opinion that state lines had nothing to do with the matter. The 29th Alabama was an old regiment and had been to the front and seen war, had fired at Yankees, and had been fired at by Yankees in return; they had no need to shoot defenseless prisoners in order to establish the enviable reputation of having killed a “damned Yank;” while the 55th Georgia was a new regiment, or at least one which had not faced the music of bullets and shells on the field of battle, they had a reputation to make yet, and they made one as guards at Andersonville, but the devil himself would not be proud of it, while the 5th Georgia Home Guards, another regiment of guards, was worse than the 55th. In making up the 5th Geo. H. G. the officers had “robbed the cradle and the grave,” as one of my comrades facetiously remarked. Old men with long white locks and beards, with palsied, trembling limbs, vied with boys, who could not look into the muzzles of their guns when they stood on the ground, who were just out of the sugar pap and swaddling clothes period of their existence, in killing a Yank. It was currently reported that they received a thirty days furlough for every prisoner they shot; besides the distinguished “honah.”