The Better Angels of Our Nature Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the camps. Despite his general’s good advice, he had settled down on the edge of the camp rather than risking the ire of the men already slumbering. He hugged the knapsack closer to him, and puckered up his full mouth determinedly. One only learned by bitter experience.
    He started in the direction of the tent city. The enlisted men lived in wedge tents, or “A” tents, because they looked like the letter
A.
They lined the fields as far as the densely wooded areas beyond, and outside each tent were stands of muskets, within easy reach, should there be a surprise attack during breakfast or while they slept.
    At the head of each row of five tents were the officers’ tents. Ten to fifteen feet separated the companies, allowing room for the men to wash and cook. The quartermaster tent where the general had taken him the previous night was located somewhere to the rear. He could just glimpse in the distance the log house, which gave this camp its name and where the people of the area did their Sunday-morning worship.
    He stood there watching as the men reluctantly threw off their warm blankets and, like him, shivered in the early-morning dampness that penetrated their bones. Men in various stages of undress, yawning, coughing, cursing, groaning, or washing, or not, in the last instance, as they struggled to prepare themselves for the day ahead, and, more urgently, for assembly, where they would answer, only half-awake, to their names.
    In a little while, the smell of food cooking wafted across, accompanied by the rhythmic clinking and grinding noise that meant coffee would soon be on the boil.
    Directly ahead was a row of larger wall tents, from one of these, the most prominent, flew a yellow flag. The boy watched a soldier in an infantryman’s blouse, the stripes of a corporal on his sleeve, crouching in front of a fire, a skillet in his hand. On the skillet were fatty strips of bacon. He stood there staring at the soldier frying the bacon, enjoying the sizzling sound, almost lulled by it, and the aroma of the coffee.
    The corporal looked up, stared a moment and then grinned at him, dark gums where his teeth should have been. The boy blinked uncertainly. A second soldier emerged from the large white tent, an enormous man, broad-shouldered and tall with a magnificent lustrous black beard that grew to the third button on his jacket, his large head crowned by a thick head of black, wavy hair.
    “What’s the matter, boy, yer hungry?” asked the first soldier, holding out the skillet as he might have offered a crumb on the palm of his hand to a nervous bird hovering near the table.
    “Yes sir.”
    “Then git yerself over here. I ain’t yer mama.”
    The boy glanced from the corporal to the other man, whose sleeve displayed the stripes of a sergeant, beneath a sew-on badge that the boy did not recognize, and held even tighter to his knapsack.
    “The boy is afraid,” said the sergeant, who had the very slightest of accents that was not American. “Don’t be afraid of us.”
    “He’s scared fer sure—” said the corporal. “He’s jest a young’un too.”
    “If you are hungry,” said the sergeant, “come, eat breakfast with us, we have plenty.”
    The corporal went cautiously toward the youngster, who backed away. He had lost too much during the night to risk the theft of the book.
    “Gently,” counseled the sergeant. “He is very nervous.”
    “Kin see that, kaint ah? Nervous as a jackrabbit, aright,” agreed the corporal. “Come on, boy,” he said, going toward him, bent over as though he was getting ready to pounce, “we ain’t gonna hurt yer none.”
    The young soldier moved forward toward the fire and the food. He trusted the sergeant, if not the toothless corporal. All around him now the camps were coming to life, somewhere was even the melancholy sound of a harmonica, and many of the men who moved around between the tents, lighting campfires and filling coffeepots, wore bandages, had an arm in a