Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, you meet everywhere about the city,
often superb-looking men, though invalids dress'd in worn uniforms, and
carrying canes or crutches. I often have talks with them, occasionally
quite long and interesting. One, for instance, will have been all
through the peninsula under McClellan--narrates to me the fights, the
marches, the strange, quick changes of that eventful campaign, and
gives glimpses of many things untold in any official reports or books or
journals. These, indeed, are the things that are genuine and precious.
The man was there, has been out two years, has been through a dozen
fights, the superfluous flesh of talking is long work'd off him, and he
gives me little but the hard meat and sinew. I find it refreshing, these
hardy, bright, intuitive, American young men, (experienc'd soldiers with
all their youth.) The vocal play and significance moves one more than
books. Then there hangs something majestic about a man who has borne his
part in battles, especially if he is very quiet regarding it when you
desire him to unbosom. I am continually lost at the absence of blowing
and blowers among these old-young American militaires. I have found some
man or other who has been in every battle since the war began, and have
talk'd with them about each one in every part of the United States, and
many of the engagements on the rivers and harbors too. I find men
here from every State in the Union, without exception. (There are more
Southerners, especially border State men, in the Union army than is
generally supposed. [A]) I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea
of what this war practically is, or what genuine America is, and her
character, without some such experience as this I am having.