Chickamauga by Shelby Foote Read Free Book Online

now, because after what happened to us I guess you can’t expect me to remember anything.
    I’ve always been used to decent treatment—somehow when I meet a man, no matter how fresh he is in the beginning, he comes to respect me in the end and I’ve never had things done to me like some girls, getting left in a strange town or had my purse stolen.
    Well, I started to tell you how I went down to the army in “old Virginia.” Never again! Wait till you hear.
    I’m used to travelling nice—once when I was a little girl my daddy took me on the cars to Baltimore—we lived in York, Pa.—and we couldn’t have been more comfortable; we had pillows and the men came through with baskets of oranges and apples, you know, singing out:
    “Want to buy some oranges or apples—or beer.”
    You know what they sell—but I never took any beer because—
    Oh I know, I’ll go on—You only want to talk about the war, like all you men. But if that’s their idea what a war is—
    Well, they stuck us all in one car and a fresh guy took our tickets and winked and said:
    “Oh, you’re going down to Hooker’s army.”
    The lights was terrible in the car, smoky and not cleaned so everything looked sort of yellow. And say that car was so old it was falling to pieces.
    There must have been forty girls in it, a lot of them from Baltimore and Philly. Only there were three or four that weren’t gay—I mean they were more, oh you know, rich people that sat up front; every once in a while an officer would pop in his head from the next car and ask them if they wanted anything. I was in the seat behind with Nell and we heard him whisper:
    “You’re in pretty terrible company but we’ll be there in a few hours and we’ll go right to headquarters, and I’ll promise you solid comfort.”
    I never will forget that night. None of us had any food except some girls behind us had some sausage and bread, and they gave us what they had left. There was a spigot you turned but no water came out. After about two hours, stopping every two minutes it seemed to me, a couple of lieutenants, loaded to the gills, came in from the next car and offered Nell and me some whiskey out of a bottle. Nell took some and I pretended to and they sat on the side of our seats. One of them started to make up to her but just then the officer that had spoken to the women, pretty high up I guess, a major or a general, came back again and asked:
    “You all right? Anything I can do?”
    One of the ladies kind of whispered to him, and heturned to the drunk that was talking to Nell and made him go back in the other car. After that there was only one officer with us; he wasn’t really so drunk, just feeling sick.
    “This certainly is a jolly looking gang,” he says. “It’s good you can hardly see them in this light. They look as if their best friend just died.”
    “What if they do,” Nell answered back. “How would you look yourself if you come all the way from Philly and then climbed in a car like this?”
    “I come all the way from the Seven Days, Sister,” he answered; pretty soon he left and said he’d try and get us some water or coffee, which was what we wanted.
    The car kept rocking and it made us both feel funny. Some of the girls was sick and some was sound asleep on each other’s shoulders.
    “Hey, where is this army?” Nell demanded. “Down in Mexico?”
    I was kind of half asleep myself by that time and didn’t answer.
    The next thing I knew I was woke up by a storm, the car was stopped again and I said, “It’s raining.”
    “Raining!” said Nell. “That’s cannon—they’re having a battle.”
    “Oh. Well, after
this
ride I don’t care who wins.”
    It seemed to be getting louder all the time, but out the windows you couldn’t see anything on account of the mist.
    In about half an hour another officer came in the car—he looked pretty messy as if he’d just crawled out of bed: his coat was still unbuttoned and he kept hitching up his