Schweinefutter

 

Battlefield searchers and the wounded were most concerned about hogs that roamed the field. Before the Confederates left Perryville, they hastily built pens to protect their comrades' corpses from farm animals. Many of the soldiers, likely fearing that their bodies could someday share the same fate, vividly recalled these pens. Mead Holmes noted, "We passed a cornfield of eight acres almost covered with pens made of rails and covered with straw. These are filled with dead rebels." Morse added, "Unless something is done, the country is uninhabitable... The country here completely ruined for the present." 

One Hoosier simply said, "The smell from the battlefield was awful as we hurried past it."
The piled fence rails were not enough to protect the dead from the free-ranging hogs that rooted up shallow graves and ate unburied bodies. Henry Fales Perry of the 38th Indiana recalled that "in several places the rebels had piled their dead like cordwood, and enclosed them in pens made of fence rails, but most of them were scattered over the field, and in many places commingled with the dead and dying of the Union Army.” Charles Francis of the 88th Illinois Infantry was appalled when he saw several dead Confederates surrounded by rails. This was done, Francis remarked, "so as to protect the remains from being attacked by the swine that prowled in the woods. The disgusting sight of these animals feeding upon human gore was more than sufficient to give them immunity from sacrifice by the hungry of our army. No one could be found sufficiently hardy to talk of eating of the flesh of hogs captured near the battlefield. No! No more than if we were an army of Hebrews." It was also said that many of the hogs died after eating the human remains.
There were not enough pens to protect all the bodies. The day after the fight, a member of Rousseau's staff commented that the swine "now held possession of the field." Seven days later, another Union officer informed his wife that the battleground was "the most horrid sight that ever man beheld. Today there are hundreds of men being eaten up by the buzzards and hogs." A member of the 81st Indiana told the New Albany Daily Ledger, "In one place lay a wounded rebel too helpless to move, and near him lay one of his dead comrades, with the top of his head torn off, and hogs eating his body-the wounded men unable to drive them away."
During the Civil War, the town of Perryville had about three hundred residents. After the battle, most of these buildings became makeshift hospitals for the thousands of wounded soldiers. Courtesy Perryville Battlefield Preservation Association.
Perryville's three hundred inhabitants, and the residents of other nearby communities, were left to bury the dead, feed the wounded and repair their farms after months of post-battle occupation. Nearly every inhabitant was affected.

- Perryville Under Fire: The Aftermath of Kentucky's Largest Civil War Battle