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
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 now he gives me little but the hard meat
and sinew...I find it refreshing, these hardy, bright, intuitive, American young men, (experienced
soldiers with all their youth.) The vital 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 another 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. (There are more Southerners, especially Border State men, in the
Union army than is generally supposed.) I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this
War practically is, or what genuine America is, and her character, without some such experience
as this I am having.
