Butler Citizen

Var Stories

A Washington correspondent writes: I held down a chair in a party a few evenings since, at a party in which Colonel Hatch, of Hannibal, Mo., who served in the Confederate army and some ex-Union soldiers were relating war stories. The Colonel, who is now a member of Congress, told many a good yarn; but none that interested me more than his description of the gloomy days of the Confederacy during the winter of 1863-64. He said they had by some means gotten hold of a bundle of Chicago papers, in one of which they found a paragraph saying that some of the farmers on the great prairies of Illinois had been forced to burn corn for fuel, on account of its cheapness and the high price of coal. He said that the paragraph had more interest for them at that time than all the other contents of the papers, and it was generally shown about and discussed through the camp. 'I remember,' said the Colonel, 'how somebody said: What's the use of fighting a people who are burning corn for fuel, while we are counting it out by the grain?' and we pretty near all agreed with him. Well,' said one of the Union men 'I remember when we took some of your men prisoners at Chancellorsville and they told us they hadn't had anything to eat for two days, we thought What's the use of fighting men who can fight like this without eating anything?'