The word deserter has been so misused in that war. Many times, a Southern wife with starving children begged her husband to come home and help provide them with food. There were times when the spring plowing needed to be done, and after the Yankees had gone through and stolen all the farming implements, a Southern soldier might slip away from his unit and rush home to tend to his family. Remember, Southern soldiers, unlike well-paid and well-fed Yankees, were volunteers. They had little to eat and knew that their families back home were starving. Most of them tended to their families and then struck out to find their old unit again and continue the struggle for independence. If their units had moved on to another front, it was not unusual for them to join the nearest Confederate unit and take up the fight again. These men should not be called deserters, but at muster they were missing, so the officer simply wrote "deserted."