In marked contrast with these two Georgia regiments was the 5th Georgia regulars. This regiment guarded us at Charleston, S. C., the following September, and during our three weeks stay at that place I have no recollection of the guards firing on us, although we were camped in an open field with nothing to prevent our escape but sickness, starvation, and a thin line of guards of the 5th Ga. regulars. But this regiment too had seen service at the front. They had been on the Perryville Campaign, had stood opposed to my regiment at the battle of Perryville and had received the concentrated volleys of Simonson’s battery and the 10th Wisconsin Infantry, and in return had placed 146 of my comrades HORS DE COMBAT. They had fought at Murfresboro and Chickamauga, at Lookout and Missionary Ridge and had seen grim visaged war in front of Sherman’s steadily advancing columns in the Atlanta campaign. Surely they had secured a record without needlessly shooting helpless prisoners. I believe all ex-prisoners will agree with me, that FIGHTING regiments furnished humane guards. For the purpose of tracking escaped prisoners, an aggregate of seventy blood-hounds were kept at Andersonville. They were run in packs of five or six, unless a number of prisoners had escaped, in which case a larger number were used. They were in charge of a genuine “nigger driver” whose delight it was to follow their loud baying, as they tracked fugitive negroes, or escaped Yanks through the forests and swamps of southern Georgia. These blood-hounds were trained to track human beings, and with their keen scent they held to the track as steadily, relentlessly as death itself; and woe betide the fugitive when overtaken, they tore and lacerated him with the blood-thirsty fierceness of a Numidian lion. These willing beasts and more willing guards were efficient factors in the hands of Winder and Wirz in keeping in subjection the prisoners entrusted to their care. But these are outside forces. Within the wooden walls of that prison were more subtile and enervating forces at work than Georgia militia or fierce blood-hound. Diarrhea, scurvy and its concomitant, gangrene, the result of insufficient and unsuitable food and the crowded and filthy state of the prison, were doing their deadly work, swiftly, surely and relentlessly. CHAPTER VIII. “Ghost. I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood; Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres; Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.” —Hamlet.