Michael Riddell wrote:I thought I'd nab this idea from another forum I'm a member of.
"i had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else."Oliver Cromwell to Sir William Spring, September 1643.
Mike.
From a current WSJ Civil War book review, a contemporary visitor to recent Bull Run Battlefield:
In one unforgettable passage from a letter home, Confederate soldier Charles Minor Blackford recalls a seemingly trivial incident as he rode across the battlefield at Bull Run: "I noticed an old doll baby with only one leg lying by the side of a Federal soldier just as it dropped from his pocket when he fell writhing in the agony of death. It was obviously a memento of some little loved one at home which he had brought so far with him and had worn close to his heart on this day of danger and death. It was strange to see that emblem of childhood, that token of a father's love lying there amidst the dead and dying. . . . I dismounted, picked it up and stuffed it back into the poor fellow's cold bosom that it might rest with him in the bloody grave which was to be forever unknown to those who loved and mourned him in his distant home."