Much depended, of course, on the cooking of the provisions furnished us. At first we tried a company cook; but we soon learned that the saying of Miles Standish,--
"If you wish a thing to be well done, You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!"
applied to cooking quite as well as to courting. We therefore soon dispensed with our cook, and although scarcely any of us knew how to cook so much as a cup of coffee when we took the field, a keen appetite, aided by that necessity which is ever the mother of invention, soon taught us how bean-soup should be made and hard-tack prepared.
Hard-tack! It is a question which I have much debated with myself while writing, whether this chapter should not be entitled "Hard-Tack." For as this article of diet was the grand staff of life to the Boys in Blue, it would seem that but little could be said of the culinary art in camp without involving some mention of hard-tack at almost every turn.
As I write, there lies before me on my table an innocent-looking cracker, which I have faithfully preserved for years. It is about the size and has the general appearance of an ordinary soda biscuit. If you take it in your hand, you will find it somewhat heavier than an ordinary biscuit, and if you bite it--but no; I will not let you bite it, for I wish to see how long I can keep it. But if you were to reduce it to a fine powder, you would find that it would absorb considerably more water than an equal weight of wheat-flour; showing that in the making of hard-tack the chief object in view is to stow away the greatest amount of nourishment in the smallest amount of space. You will also observe that this cracker is very hard. This you may perhaps attribute to its great age. But if you imagine that its age is to be measured only by the years which have elapsed since the war, you are greatly mistaken; for there was a common belief among the boys that our hard-tack had been baked long before the commencement of the Christian era! This opinion was based upon the fact that the letters B. C. were stamped on many, if not indeed all, of the cracker-boxes. To be sure there were some wiseacres who shook their heads, and maintained that these mysterious letters were the initials of the name of some army contractor or inspector of supplies; but the belief was wide-spread and deep-seated that they were without a doubt intended to set forth the era in which our bread had been baked.