John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life

[220] must have had as many boxes sent as the average among the soldiers, and simple justice to those who had the handling of them requires me to state that I never missed a single article from them, and, barring the breakage of two or three bottles, which may or may not have been the fault of the opener, the contents were always undamaged. Sometimes the boxes were sent directly from brigade headquar-

A wagon-load of boxes.

ters to the headquarters of each company without inspection, and there only those were opened whose owners were known to imbibe freely on occasion.

The boxes came, when they came at all, by wagon-loads -mule teams of the company going after them. I have already intimated that none were sent to the army when it was on the move or when a campaign was imminent; and as these moves were generally foreshadowed with tolerable accuracy, the men were likely to send their orders home at about the same time, and so they would receive their boxes together. In this way it happened that they came to camp by wagon-loads, and a happier, lighter-hearted body of men than those who were gathered around the wagons could not have been found in the service. I mean now those who were