Another thing that we terribly lacked was gunpowder--the one supreme agent of all warfare. Our fire was often compulsorily made as light as possible, in order to spare our cartridge boxes. To supply this rudimentary need, the women of the country diligently dug up the earthen floors of all their smokehouses, and all their tobacco barns, and rendered out the nitre they contained. Some of them even destroyed their tobacco crops by boiling, in order to extract the precious salt necessary to the destruction of their enemy. In the cities, our womenkind were requested to preserve and deliver to government collectors all those slops that contain nitre. It was in this way alone that we got gunpowder enough to maintain resistance to the end. And we had equally to pinch in other ways in order that we might continue to be “fighting men.” All the window-weights in all the houses, and all the other leaden things that could be melted down, were converted into bullets. Even then we ran dreadfully short towards the end of the war. At Petersburg, good soldiers felt it to be their duty to spend all their spare time in collecting the multitudinous bullets with which the ground was everywhere strewn. These battered missiles turned into the arsenals were remoulded and came back to us in the form of effective, fixed ammunition. When we marched to meet Grant in the Wilderness, in the spring of 1864, we were about the most destitute army that ever marched to meet anybody, anywhere. We had nothing to transport, and we had no transportation. At the beginning of every campaign it is customary for the commanding general to issue an order, setting forth the allotment of baggage wagons to officers and men. Just before we marched that spring some wag in the army had printed and circulated a mock order from General Lee, a copy of which now lies before me. GENERAL ORDERS, NUMBER 1. HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, April 20, 1864. The allotment of baggage wagons to the officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia during the coming campaign will be as follows:-- To every thirty officers.... No baggage wagon. To every three hundred men.... Ditto. (Signed) ROBERT E. LEE, General.