The storm did one good thing:  it swept away a great deal of filth, and left the camp much more wholesome.  The foul stench rising from the camp made an excellent electrical conductor, and the lightning struck several times within one hundred feet of the prison.

Toward the end of August there happened what the religously inclined termed a Providential Dispensation.  The water in the Creek was indescribably bad.  No amount of familiarity with it, no increase of intimacy with our offensive surroundings, could lessen the disgust at the polluted water.  As I have said previously, before the stream entered the Stockade, it was rendered too filthy for any use by the contaminations from the camps of the guards, situated about a half-mile above.  Immediately on entering the Stockade the contamination became terrible.  The oozy seep at the bottom of the hillsides drained directly into it all the mass of filth from a population of thirty-three thousand.  Imagine the condition of an open sewer, passing through the heart of a city of that many people, and receiving all the offensive product of so dense a gathering into a shallow, sluggish stream, a yard wide and five inches deep, and heated by the burning rays of the sun in the thirty-second degree of latitude.  Imagine, if one can, without becoming sick at the stomach, all of these people having to wash in and drink of this foul flow.

There is not a scintilla of exaggeration in this statement.  That it is within the exact truth is demonstrable by the testimony of any man—­Rebel or Union—­who ever saw the inside of the Stockade at Andersonville.  I am quite content to have its truth—­as well as that of any other statement made in this book—­be determined by the evidence of any one, no matter how bitter his hatred of the Union, who had any personal knowledge of the condition of affairs at Andersonville.  No one can successfully deny that there were at least thirty-three thousand prisoners in the Stockade, and that the one shallow, narrow creek, which passed through the prison, was at once their main sewer and their source of supply of water for bathing, drinking and washing.  With these main facts admitted, the reader’s common sense of natural consequences will furnish the rest of the details.

It is true that some of the more fortunate of us had wells; thanks to our own energy in overcoming extraordinary obstacles; no thanks to our gaolers for making the slightest effort to provide these necessities of life.  We dug the wells with case and pocket knives, and half canteens to a depth of from twenty to thirty feet, pulling up the dirt in pantaloons legs, and running continual risk of being smothered to death by the caving in of the unwalled sides.  Not only did the Rebels refuse to give us boards with which to wall the wells, and buckets for drawing the water, but they did all in their power to prevent us from digging the wells, and made continual forays to capture the digging tools, because the wells were frequently used as the starting places for tunnels.  Professor Jones lays special stress on this tunnel feature in his testimony, which I have introduced in a previous chapter.