Read Soldier's Heart for Free Online

take care of themselves. They left sewage in the open, didn’t drain the slops from their shelters and consequently were virtually destroyed by disease. Some New York companies lost more than half their men to dysentery, typhus, measles and diarrhea, which soon spread to other units.
    It seemed somebody was always either getting sick, was sick, or was getting over something.
    Charley and the rest were kept moving just working at repairing the shelter, keeping it clean and cooking. The food was simple and for the most part bad: beans, always beans, salt pork and coffee. Soon a bakery with wood-fired ovens was going and bread was doled out to the men. The plan was to give each man a pound of bread a day but it rarely worked out that well. The sutlers kept plying their trade and brought cakes and pies and cookies to the men, but the prices went up—fifty cents for acake that tasted as if it was made of wood—and most of the men only bought from the sutlers in dire emergency. Charley once relented and bought an apple pie but when he sat down to eat it there were only three small slices of apple in it and nearly no sugar.
    If they had the ingredients housewives on nearby farms cooked and sold meals to the men, but getting food this way was chancy, to say the least. There were over ninety thousand men in the camp and perhaps twenty farms where food might be available. To feed all the men three meals a day, the farm wives would have had to make thirteen to fifteen thousand meals a day each. Besides, the officers seemed to get most of this good food.
    Officers were initially the only ones allowed whiskey as well. Charley didn’t drink but like everybody else thought it unfair in the extreme that only officers were considered able to handle it. There was a small mutiny among someof the units and soon whiskey was made available to all troops, although the enlisted men were to be issued it by the sutlers—a shot a day “to ward off the ague, chill and fever of winter camp”—and were supposed to drink it right where it was issued.
    There was very little that was fair about the whole situation, at least from Charley’s viewpoint, and it quickly became obvious to him that it was every man for himself.
    He became adept at camp survival. He pulled his own weight, took his turn gathering food and wood, and cleaning, and cooking, but he made a private world for himself where he kept his thoughts and knowledge. He worked constantly on his equipment, shining the leather, changing his cartridges if they became damp or seemed even a bit moist, and most of all tending to his feet and his rifle.
    â€œCharley, you’re going to wear that rifle out,” a man named Campbell told him onenight while they sat by the trench stove. They had learned how to dig a trench a foot wide and a foot deep along the floor of their shelter, then out under a wall and into the open. The trench was covered with flat rocks and a barrel placed over the opening outside to make a passable chimney. When the men built a fire in the trench inside the log hut, the rocks would become hot and heat the whole shelter.
    Charley looked up at Campbell, then back to his rifle. He had forgotten none of what had happened. He knew it would come again. It had to come again because they were here. You did not have an army without a battle. It was what the generals wanted, what they needed: a battle to use their armies. On both sides it was all up to the generals, the officers. If it was left up to the men who did the killing and dying there would be no war.
    Death would still come.
    â€œI’ll be needing this rifle.” He spoke down, as if talking to the weapon. He did not like tolook at people as much as he once did. He did not like to learn about them. It was better if he didn’t know them, become too friendly with them. They died so fast.
    â€œ
Pshaw!
We’ll be in this camp all winter. They ain’t going to fight when