Andersonville Read Free

wait for the fellows behind them to exit and then get out on the other side of the car.
    Barclay and Charlie and the rest of the line of men got to their feet, knees popping like embers in a campfire, and slowly turned to shuffle out behind the other prisoners.
    Barclay felt something snap beneath his shoes and looked down to see a spindly white arm bent awkwardly at the wrist beneath his foot. He recoiled but was jostled toward the other door by the men crowding behind him and never saw the owner of the arm, who he assumed had died during the sojourn.
    Deeper in the car, away from the open doorway, the stench of filth and piss wafted up from the straw-covered floor, and he thanked God he had not had to ride in the middle.
    Finally he and Charlie reached the edge of the train and jumped down onto a crude plank platform situated before a diminutive whistle-stop consisting of a single log cabin. Over the door hung another rude sign etched in the same hand as the station name. This one read BEN DYKES, AGENT . An older man with a white-flecked red beard leaned in the lit doorway and chewed tobacco, watching the proceedings with a half-lidded lack of interest.
    Sergeant Beam yelled for the men to form up by their regiments, and Charlie nudged him in the arm with a bony elbow.
    “See you inside, Barclay,” he said, and slipped into the confused mass of blue tunics.
    At least Barclay had it easier in that regard. He merely drifted toward the other black soldiers, and they filed into ordered lines as all around them their white counterparts murmured and wandered and were cussed by their captors.
    None of the other black soldiers seemed to take much notice of him. There had been talk that the Rebs wouldn’t even take Negro prisoners, and maybe some of them were worried that they’d soon face a firing squad. Barclay wasn’t overly worried about that, though. If execution had been their fate, the Rebs wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of carting them this far down the Central Railroad.
    After about a half hour of confusion in the dim lantern light of the whistle-stop, with pitch blackness all around them, the prisoners stood in line coughing out the cool air and fidgeting.
    A strange figure appeared behind the line of Rebs, obviously a man of some importance by his bearing. He was round-shouldered and black-bearded, and he kept his right arm tucked into a black sash that hung over his shoulder. He rode a white horse, which he spurred furiously up and down the length of the prisoners, barking for them to stay in line in a deep voice with a folksy, lilting cadence Barclay recognized as Swiss. He wore linen pants and a butternut coat over a matching tunic that bore the insignia of a captain and had an officer’s kepi cap set squarely on his head.
    “Got-dammit, you Yankees, you stand in line and listen for your names!” the captain yelled as he passed before the colored soldiers.
    At the sight of them, the captain wheeled his horse around and sneered.
    “Well, well, more black backs to haul firewood and shovel
scheisse
. Goot!”
    Somewhere behind Barclay a man muttered, “The Flying Dutchman,” and snickered, but the captain didn’t hear him.
    He bolted off toward the front of the line and stood behind Sergeant Beam as he called out the names of one of the white regiments.
    It took another hour for Beam at last to reach the 57th, and by that time many of the men were swaying where they stood.
    To their right stood another group of ninety or so white soldiers, and as Beam shuffled through the roll papers, one of them groaned: “Hey, Cap’n, you got any bread we could eat?”
    “I don’t pack bread for Yankees,” the Swiss captain replied, slapping his hand on the butt of the pistol in the reverse-draw cavalry holster on his belt. “I pack bullets.”
    Sergeant Beam announced the 57th Colored Regiment and began to read off a list of names. One by one the black soldiers replied “present” as their names were