The weeding process worked among the men in a different way. The old and weak and physically unfit broke down. Some of them died; a number of them were discharged from the service. At the end of a month we had lost more officers and as many men as a smartly-contested battle would have cost us, and instead of being weaker we were distinctly stronger for it. The law of the survival of the fittest was beginning to work. In another way the weeding process proceeded. Every army requires a great many non-combatants as its servants. There must be waggoners, clerks at headquarters, ambulance drivers, hospital attendants, "detailed men" of many sorts, and each regiment has to furnish its quota of these. When, therefore, an order would come to detail a man, perhaps for ambulance driver, the colonel would send it down to a captain with the hint, "Detail the worst dead beat in your company." Sometimes these non-combatant positions were sought by those who had no stomach for the fight, and thus, in different ways, our thinned ranks became cleaner. We learned other things by the discipline of the march. We learned to live as soldiers must. Life in a well-ordered camp and camp life in the field are vastly different. The army lived in shelter tents. These were simply pieces of cotton cloth about six feet square, and each man carried one piece on his knapsack. Two or three buttoned together and stretched over such poles or sticks as could be found, or over muskets set in the ground when nothing else could be had, formed our habitation. We literally carried our houses on our backs. We slept on the ground, or rather, we learned not to sleep on the ground. Pine branches made a luxurious bed, but anything served--dried grass, boughs of saplings, even corn stalks, though they were worse than boarding-house mattresses. I have slept on unthreshed wheat--anything to keep the body from direct contact with the ground, which, even in summer chills one through before morning. Then, wood for fires must be had. Through the hill country of Virginia we used the fences. When the welcome halt was called at evening and arms stacked, it was a sight to see eight or nine hundred men joining with wild cheers in a mad charge on the nearest rail fence. Sometimes our colonel would draw us up in line and give the word, so that all might have an even chance, and then, after a brisk scrimmage the fence would disappear as if by magic. Dry rails made the best of camp-fires, but the skill which men developed at fire-making was wonderful. We had few axes beside the dozen carried by the pioneer corps, whose duty it was to clear obstructions from the road; we had to break up our rails or break down branches as best we could. Our jack-knives did yeoman service. Often green wood alone was available; and I have actually seen fires kindled in the midst of pouring rain with nothing but such apparently impossible materials as green pine saplings.