Andersonville Read Free Page B

horse bobbing slowly in front of the column, a ghostly figure at their head, a phantom leading them to some predetermined doom.
    The ceremonial feel of the march, which extended about a quarter of a mile, culminated in the appearance of a pair of ominous massive wooden gates set on thick iron hinges within a primitive pine log palisade fourteen feet high whose length Barclay could not determine. It was like a huge Viking fortress situated in the middle of a hollow carved out of the deep backwoods.
    When they passed out of the forest, he spied the lights of an encampment on a bluff to the north, and he saw a trio of artillery pieces silently awaiting the dawn, their inward-facing muzzles trained on the prison.
    The sky was a deep, dark blue by the time they were ordered to halt, and Barclay saw spiraling columns of smoke rising high into the sky over the wall and smelled burning wood and trash, as if the whole place were a dump, constantly ablaze.
    The captain signaled to a diminutive sharpshooter standing in a kind of open-air sentry box with a slanted roof on the wall. The man yelled down an order in a surprisingly high voice, and a few moments later the massive gates groaned open and the group of white soldiers ahead of them marched inside with the captain. Barclay craned his neck but could see nothing of the interior except another set of gates.
    The column was ordered to advance and then stop at the gates as they swung shut behind the first group. He noticed that there was a wicket set into the great door, a smaller entryway, probably, so that less substantial groups could pass through without necessitating the laborious opening and closing of the heavy gates.
    Barclay almost expected to hear a volley of rifle fire from within, but there was only the shouting of the captain and the wooden groan of the second set of gates opening. There came a noise of many voices beyond the wall, all running together and unintelligible.
    They waited under the muzzle of the guards’ rifles until the gates opened again like a great ponderous machine that had swallowed the previous entrants.
    The black soldiers marched inside. They passed a large house of boughs beside which sat a big open wagon with a mule team waiting in the traces. There was a ribbon of running water perhaps forty yards to the south that appeared to drift under the wall into the stockade. Beside the creek was a busy-looking bake house. Barclay watched a pair of men in aprons dump a vat of yellowish grease into the water. Far to the south on another rise, a battery of twelve more cannons stood watch over the prison.
    They stopped in a kind of lock between the outer and inner palisade walls. Rifles were trained down on them while the gates shut behind them, and as they waited, a few of the men stationed above directed long lines of brownish tobacco spit down on their heads. Barclay’s shoulder was struck with a copious deluge of the nasty stuff, and he closed his eye against the spatter.
    Then the tedious process was completed by the opening of the inner doors.
    Beyond lay hell.
    Or as near to hell on earth that Barclay had ever seen, anyway.
    The stench of the place was the first thing to hit them, and a few of the soldiers doubled over in a wave of sudden, unexpected nausea and instantly heaved their guts into the mud.
    There was no provision made for any such weakness, though, and the Rebels yelled shrilly for them to get inside on the double. The men in the back were goaded and kicked, stumbling into the ones who had lost their composure in the front.
    The rising sun spilled a blinding reddish-orange light down on the place, which was vaster than he had expected.
    All inside was mud or dust. Even the stumps that must have furnished the walls had been ripped clear of the tramped, hard-packed earth. Every inch of the nearly thirty acres of ground not vacated by the narrow avenue that continued almost out of sight to the far wall of the stockade was crowded with low