SOLDIERS AND TALKS
Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, you meet everywhere about the city,
often superb-looking men, though invalids dress'd in worn uniforms,
and carrying canes or crutches. I often have talks with them,
occasionally quite long and interesting. One, for instance, will have
been all through the peninsula under McClellan--narrates to me the
fights, the marches, the strange, quick changes of that eventful
campaign, and gives glimpses of many things untold in any official
reports or books or journals. These, indeed, are the things that are
genuine and precious. The man was there, has been out two years, has
been through a dozen fights, the superfluous flesh of talking is long
work'd off him, and he gives me little but the hard meat and sinew.
I find it refreshing, these hardy, bright, intuitive, American young
men, (experienc'd soldiers with all their youth.) The vocal play and
significance moves one more than books. Then there hangs something
majestic about a man who has borne his part in battles, especially if
he is very quiet regarding it when you desire him to unbosom. I am
continually lost at the absence of blowing and blowers among these
old-young American militaires. I have found some man or other who has
been in every battle since the war began, and have talk'd with them
about each one in every part of the United States, and many of the
engagements on the rivers and harbors too. I find men here from every
State in the Union, without exception.
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