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but infantry and artillery must needs confine their quests for special rations to the homesteads near the line of march.
The cavalry not only could and did search these when they led the advance, but also made requisitions on all houses in sight of the thoroughfares travelled, even when they were two or three miles away, so that, in all probability, they ate a smaller quantity of government rations, man for man, than did any other branch of the land-service; but they did not therefore always fare sumptuously, for now and then the cavalry too were in a strait for rations.
Next to the cavalry, the infantry stood the best chance of good living on foraged edibles, as their picket-duty took them away some distance from the main lines and often into the neighborhood of farm-houses, from which they would buy or take such additions to their rations as the premises afforded.
Then, they went out in reconnoitring parties, or, perhaps, to do fatigue duty, such as the building of bridges, or the corduroying of roads, which also opened opportunities for them to enlist a few turkeys or chickens in the Union cause.
Perhaps the most unfortunate natives were those who chanced to live in a house by the roadside in the direct line of march of the army, for, from the time the head of the column struck such a house until the last straggler left it, there was a continuous stream of officers and men thronging into and about the premises, all ambitious to buy or beg or take whatsoever in the line of eatables and drinkables was to be had by either of these methods.
The net result of this was to leave such families in a starving condition, and finally begging rations from the army.
Those families by whose premises both armies marched were in the depths of distress, for Confederate soldiers let little in the way of provisions escape their maws on their line of march, even in Virginia; so that it was not unusual for such families to meet the Union advance with tearful eyes, and relate the losses which they had sustained and the beggary to which
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