The Better Angels of Our Nature Read Online Free PDF

sling or hobbled on a crutch, as if they had been wounded. He looked into the large white tent from where the sergeant had emerged and saw a row of cots on both sides where men lay or sat.
    There was sweat on the boy’s face, on his upper lip and on his brow. He rubbed it away with the back of his hand. The sergeant came to meet him; quickening his pace, guessing that the boy was weak, and he lifted him effortlessly in his strong arms as the boy held tight to the knapsack, held with the last ounce of strength left in his arms. The sergeant called for a blanket as the boy closed his eyes.
    When he opened his eyes again, perhaps only a few minutes later, he was wrapped in a blanket and sitting near the fire, the knapsack still held against his chest. The sergeant was holding a tin cup to his lips and urging him to drink the warm liquid.
    “Drink slowly, child, very slowly.” He laid a hand on the boy’s damp brow, a remarkably gentle hand, considering the sergeant was a giant of a man with hands to match. “There is no fever.” He spoke with the authority of one who knows from experience.
    “Thank…thank you…sir…” the boy stammered. “I wasn’t afraid, sir—”
    “No, just cold, and hungry, I think.” The sergeant’s full red lips parted in a reassuring smile.
    “Does he wanna eat sumpthin’?” asked the corporal, coming into view at the left corner of the boy’s sight as he dangled a slice of bacon dripping grease onto the earth. He peered into the young soldier’s pale, generously freckled face. “Bacon grease and oatmeal. Good fer what ails yer.”
    “Just the drink…thank you, sir…” the boy said, cupping his hands around the tin cup that the sergeant was still patiently holding for him. “Coffee?”
    “Tea,” said the sergeant, “better for your stomach.” He drew the blanket closer around the boy’s narrow shoulders and inquired, “How is that?”
    “Warm, sir, thank you.”
    “I am Sergeant Jacob De Groot, and your name is…?”
    “Jesse Davis. Pleased to meet you, sir.” The boy extracted his right hand from the folds of the blanket and offered it to the sergeant, who grasped it tightly. His rich laughter warmed the boy almost as much as the tea and the blanket. To the corporal he said, “Pleased to meet you too, sir.”
    “Sir, is it? Well, least he’s po-lite.” The corporal poked the boy in the ribs like a housewife checking for meat on a hen before parting with any money. “Though seems to me if’in he’s what they’re enlistin’ these days we ain’t never gonna whip those Rebs, not in a month a Sundays. That there boy don’t look strong ’nough to lift a musket. A whole darn regimint a boys like him ain’t worth spit.”
    “Not only can I
lift
a musket, sir, I can load and fire one,” said Jesse Davis. “General Sherman
himself
taught me how!”
    “Pfufff! Now yer don’t have to go makin’ up no stories jest to prove a point.”
    “General Sherman advised me to find veteran soldiers who would show me what I needed to know to survive. You look like a veteran soldier, sir.”
    “Well, now, ain’t that jest like old Gen. Sherman, always handin’ out good advice to anyone who’ll listen.” To the sergeant he said, “Boy’s soft in the head.”
    “I don’t believe he is,” said the sergeant with an esoteric smile, “and if so—all the more reason for us to take care of him.”
    “Barble talk.” The corporal was disdainful as he first scratched at and then removed a “grayback” from his armpit, squashed it between forefinger and thumb and deposited the corpse in the fire. He coughed up a ball of phlegm that he shot at a large black beetle that was crawling across the ground in front of his feet and missed by a mile. He flattened it instead with the heel of one of his enormous brogans.
    The boy sat on a tree stump and ate two strips of bacon and some beans while he watched the great activity at this hospital camp of the Seventieth Ohio, Fourth