Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 1

[372] bring the enemy immediately beneath the walls, when, covered by their works, and more numerous than the besieged, the assailants, in every human probability, would storm the town, and all the unutterable horrors to which fallen cities are exposed, might come upon the devoted fortress.

Even if the garrison held out, it was only to prolong its miseries; starvation must come at last. The privations and exposures of the men were telling on their strength and spirits. The miasmatic exhalations of the swamps, rising through the hot atmosphere of June, enveloped and penetrated their weary frames, exhausted by the long series of disastrous battles, and protracted marches, and incessant bivouacs; debilitated, too, by the alternate fevers of anxiety and the still more terrible chills of despair. Their numbers were reduced by casualties, but far more by disease. Thousands were tossing and groaning in the hospitals, with none of the delicacies and little of the attention that the sick require; while those in the trenches were hardly better off. Forty-seven long days and nights they lay there without intermission, for Pemberton had not men enough to relieve his commands. Scorched by the sun, drenched by the rain, begrimed with dirt, unable to wash their bodies or their clothes, for water was far off, and time more precious still; pinched with hunger, anxious every moment for their lives, these weary but heroic rebels defended the citadel, whose fall, they believed, would be the fall of their confederacy. Those who fought them hardest could not and did not fail to recognize their splendid gallantry, and thorough devotion to an unrighteous cause.

Perhaps, to some among them, the suffering was