January 13 — This far in the new year the weather has been very disagreeable, windy, and cold. Last night about nine o’clock a man died, frozen to death or starved in bed, in the next tent to mine. The orderly sergeant of our company called for four volunteers to bear the corpse to the dead house; I volunteered for one. The night was bitter cold, with a full moon in a clear, wintry sky which rendered the night almost as bright as day. As we bore the body of our comrade through the silent street the pale silvery moonbeams with kindly light played softly over the cold thin white face of the dead. The moonlit wavelets of the Bay, as they kissed the pebbly strand, whispered a soft vesper hymn, a fitting requiem, as we moved away with our silent burden toward the house of the dead. When we arrived at the dead house, which is a large Sibley tent, the Great Reaper had already harvested seven sheaves garnered in silent waiting for the morrow’s interment. The burial hour here is daily at four o’clock in the afternoon, and the man that we carried to the dead house made the eighth one that died from four o’clock until nine. Death with its fatal shears clips a brittle thread of life here, and with insatiable greed calls for “next” every hour of the day and night and gathers on an average twenty-five passengers for the daily train to the Silent City. The man that we carried to the dead house was a Virginian from Floyd County. He attended roll-call yesterday evening; I saw him standing in ranks, but he looked wan and frail.
