[The following takes place during the American Civil War.]
On this day – while their wives and sisters at home backed breads and cakes, while their children practiced singing Christmas carols, while their faraway friends stood in warm taverns drinking toasts to the holiday season – the men of Company K would be marched off through the raw December breeze to witness a hanging.
Sergeant Clear described this day in his diary: the half-mile hike to the gallows; troops jeering the three deserters who were about to die; how the executioner bungled his job. Then he concluded his diary entry with this remark: “And off we go, I think no more of it until we get our dinners, as that is the next thing on the program.”
The sergeant’s words were hard, disinterested. They made him appear unmoved by tragedy. He reread them in the postwar years and perhaps reconsidered them. In the end, however, he allowed them to go unchanged. On that day, in that diary entry, he had chosen his words for coolness and impact, and to record a subtle message: In his ten months of army service he had already seen thousands of dead men. He was no brute. But the Civil War had changed him. It changed everyone who survived it.
Source:
Chisholm, Daniel, et al. “Introduction.” The Civil War Notebook of Daniel Chisholm: A Chronicle of Daily Life in the Union Army, 1864-1865. Ballantine Books, 1990. ix. Print.
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