Green soldiers.

[**The following is in regards to soldiers during the time period of the opening phases of what would be known as the American Civil War.**] >Green soldiers make mistakes, most trifling, some fatal. One morning at Castle Pinckney a young member of the Carolina Light Infantry was shot and killed by a overzealous sentry. A volunteer stationed at the arsenal, no doubt horsing around or inebriated, fell from a window to his death. One unlucky volunteer fell from a railroad car as it was arriving in the city and was crushed. Another died of gastroenteritis. (He would be the first of well over a hundred thousand such deaths during the coming war, when more soldiers would perish from sickness and diarrhea than from cannon fire.) A young volunteer at Moultrie, who had just had his eighteenth birthday, was playing with his pistol, yanked it out of his belt, and shot himself in the thigh. According to his obituary, as he was carried away he told his comrades that his only regret was that he would not be there when they took Fort Sumter. >A few days later a nineteen-year-old from upstate named James Clark Allen was killed in a horrible accident. His unit was quartered on the second floor of the Moultrie House. He and his comrades had just finished a dress parade, and he tore back to his room, dropped off his gun and knapsack and other appurtenances, then sped out the door. One of his messmates, slower than he, staggering up the steps with his musket, bayonet fixed, had just reached the top of the stairs when Allen charged out of his quarters. >The bayonet entered Allen’s right eye, and killed him. ______________________________ **Source:** Detzer, David. “The Boys on the Beach.” *Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War*. New York: Harcourt, 2002. 195-96. Print.