twenty-eight years I could understand their attitude. But they were soldiers, so most of them got killed in those woods and when we took the three towns that looked so innocent and were really fortresses. They were just built to tempt us and we had no word on them at all. To continue to use the silly parlance of my trade: this could or could not be faulty intelligence.
“I feel terribly about the regiment,” the girl said. She had wakened and spoken straight from sleep.
“Yes,” said the Colonel. “So do I. Let’s drink to it once. Then you go to sleep, Daughter please. The war is over and forgotten.”
Please don’t think that I am conceited, Daughter, he said, without speaking. His true love was sleeping again. She slept in a different way than his career girl had slept. He did not like to remember how the career girl slept, yes he did. But he wanted to forget it. She did not sleep pretty, he thought. Not like this girl who slept as though she were awake and alive; except she was asleep. Please sleep well, he thought.
Who the hell are you to criticize career girls? he thought. What miserable career did you attempt and have failed at?
I wished to be, and was, a General Officer in the Army of the United States. I have failed and I speak badly of all who have succeeded.
Then his contrition did not last, and he said to himself, “Except the brown-nosers, the five and ten and twenty percenters and all the jerks from wherever who never fought and hold commands.”
They killed several men from the academy at Gettysburg.
