‘ [260] Heights,’ he writes: ‘I am giving personal attention to every detail of food and clothing, and expect to get the system so organized that it must always work right.’ Again, he says:—
The event of yesterday was the arrival of the coffee-mills. Colonel Gordon reports that the men are in ecstasies with them. I am only a witness by his report, for I was ordered off on this duty just as the coffee-mills arrived. I know how badly they were needed, and I hear how admirably they work. Night before last accumulated the evidence from reports of Captains and Quartermaster about the want of tea, hard bread, salt pork, &c. I went up to General Banks's Headquarters and had a long talk with him, urging the remedies which have occurred to my mind. The General promises to change all this, and to accomplish the regular and constant issue of the ration to the soldier, in the form and at the moment required by law.Again, he writes:—
I wish you to buy and forward, by express, a large coffeeroaster, which will roast thirty or forty pounds of coffee at a time. It would be of immense advantage to us.On its arrival he writes:—
The coffee-roaster is lovely, and wins golden opinions. At last, also, we have tea; and, indeed, we have waked up our Commissary to something like activity.At one time he writes:—
We had a visit from General Banks yesterday. The General visited our kitchens, and tasted, with apparent approval, my doughnuts. I say mine, because I regard as perhaps the most successful endeavor of my military life the general introduction of doughnuts into the regiment. If you could have seen the helplessness in which the flour ration had left us, and the stupidity of the men in its use, you would hail as the dawn the busy frying of doughnuts which goes on here now. Two barrels are a small allowance for a company. They are good to carry in the haversack, and “stick by a fellow on the march” ; and when the men have not time to build an oven, as often they have not, the idea is invaluable. Pots of beans baked in holes in the ground, with a pan of brown bread on top, is also a recent achievement, worthy of Sunday morning at an
