Short Story Classics American Volume Two - Various

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A Short History of the United States 9h 29m 8 chapters transcribed 6 hours ago
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What is the setting and who are the key military figures introduced at the beginning?

Unknown 0:00
Section 1 of Short Story Classics, American, Volume 2, by Various. The colonel was the idol of his bragging old regiment and of the bragging brigade, which for the last six months he had commanded. He was the idol not because he was good and gracious, not because he spared his soldiers or treated them as fellow citizens, but because he had led them to victory and made them famous. If a man will win battles and give his brigade a right to brag loudly of its doings, he may have its admiration and even its enthusiastic devotion, though he be as pitiless and as wicked as Lucifer. it's nothing to me what the colonel is in privet so long as he shows us how to whack the rebs said major gahogan commandant of the old tenth moses saw god in the burning bush and bowed down to it and worshipped it it wasn't the bush he worshipped it was his god that was in it and i worship this villain of a colonel if he is a villain cause he's almighty and gives us the victory he's nothing but a human burning bush perhaps but he's got the god o war in him
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agerton wallace it's a blank and long time between drinks as i think he was saying and with raisin see if you can confiscate a canteen o whisky somewhere in the camp but dad if i can't buy it i'll stale it we're going to fight tamati and it may be it's the last chance we'll have for a drink unless there's more like her now in the other world than dive's got the brigade was bivouacked in some invisible region amid the damp misty darkness of a september night the men lay in their ranks each with his feet to the front and his head rearward each covered by his overcoat and pillowed upon his haversack each with his loaded rifle nestled close beside him asleep as they were or dropping placidly into slumber they were ready to start in order to their feet and pour out the red light and harsh roar of combat
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there were two lines of battle each of three regiments of infantry the first some two hundred yards in advance of the second in the space between them lay two four-gun batteries one of them brass twelve-pounder napoleons and the other rifled parrots to the rear of the infantry were the recumbent troopers and picketed horses of a regiment of cavalry all around in the far black distance invisible and inaudible paced or watched stealthily the sentinels of the grand guards there was not a fire not a torch nor a starbeam in the whole bivouac to guide the feet of adjutant wallace in his pilgrimage after whiskey the orders from brigade headquarters had been strict against illuminations for the confederates were near at hand in force and a surprise was proposed as well as feared a tired and sleepy youngster almost dropping with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence he stumbled on through the trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing
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lifting his heavy riding boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles and fearing the while lest his toil were labor misspent it was a dry camp he felt dolefully certain or there would have been more noise in it he fell over a sleeping sergeant and said to him hastily steady man a friend as the half-roused soldier clutched his rifle then he found a lieutenant and shook him in vain further on a captain and exchanged saddening murmurs with him further still a camp follower of african extraction and blasphemed him it's a god-forsaken camp and there isn't a horn in it said adjutant wallace to himself as he pursued his groping journey bet you i don't find the first drop he continued for he was a betting boy and frequently argued by wagers even with himself bet you two to one i don't bet you three to one ten to one
Unknown 3:49
then he saw an indefinite distance beyond him burning like red-hot iron through the darkness a little scarlet or crimson gleam as of a lighted cigar that's old grumps of the bloody fourteenth he thought i've raided into his happy sleeping grounds I'll draw on him.' But old Grumps, otherwise Colonel Lafayette Gildersleeve, had no rations, that is, no whiskey. "'How do you suppose an officer is to have a drink, Lieutenant?'

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