In the kitchen end, beside the door, we built a fireplace and chimney. Now a wooden fireplace and chimney may seem ludicrously impractical, yet that is what we and thousands of others actually built from green pine sticks. But we fireproofed it with a coating of clay on the inside, and it answered its purpose perfectly. It "drew" finely and gave us no end of solid comfort. Some of the chimneys did not work so well and then the draught was increased by the precarious expedient of an empty, headless barrel placed on top. This generally served for a short time; but the barrel was pretty sure to take fire and then there would be a grand excitement and much merriment over the frantic effort to extinguish the blaze.
Not the chimneys alone played tricks on the householders. Mischievous comrades have been known to drop a handful of cartridges down a chimney from the outside, with the result of a smothered explosion and a great scattering of ashes and embers over everything and everybody within.
The spirit of fun also found outlet in the adornment of the gables of our dwellings with various legends suggestive of the personal peculiarities of the inmates. For instance, of two queerly assorted tent-mates, one had been a church sexton and a conspicuous functionary at village funerals; the other had worked in a silverware factory. Over their door some wag tacked a sign with the inscription:
DOWD AND GRIFFITH, JEWELLERS AND UNDERTAKERS.
As few of us were content with the wholesale and not too dainty work of the company cooks, we did most of our cooking ourselves by our kitchen fires, and those of us who survived the war learned enough to make us useful to the women who were wise enough to choose us as husbands, though I fear the details of our housekeeping would have shocked them.
Many a pleasant evening we spent about our little fireplace. We talked about home, the girls we loved, religion, politics, literature, camp gossip, everything. Or we read, when we had books or papers from home, or wrote letters or our journals.
There was, however, little real privacy in those huts so close together with their canvas roofs. Any loud talk could be heard from one to the other and in the evening after "retreat" the camp became a very babel of men singing, talking, laughing, swearing, telling stories; a chorus in one tent, a game of cards in another; in three or four at once loud discussions of the doings in the regiment or of the state of the country.