“Maybe Emp’s just four-flushing. A lot of us spend our spare time hunting for what we know isn’t there. It gives us something to exercise our mind.”
“He fights that flea so long and makes such little headway, I’ve a good mind to change his name and call him General McClellan.”
“Hush, lad!” warned Dad, half-serious, half-jesting. “There’s enough criticism all over without our joining in. The whole country is hammering little Mac just now. And maybe the whole country’s wrong, or maybe the whole country’s right. Anyhow, neither the country nor the army nor Mac is the better for it. So don’t let’s you and I add our lung-power to it.
“It’s easy enough to sit back and criticize. But Little Mac is where a word of praise would help more. So is President Lincoln.”
“Dad,” the boy leaned forward earnestly, as though consulting an all-wise oracle, “is it always going to be like this?”
“Like what, son?”
“The thing that’s gone on all year. The Confeds licking us any time and any way they please, and mussing up all our plans and fooling our generals and slipping out of our traps and then belting us in the jaw? Are we always going to be the licked ones? It’s getting just a little monotonous.
“We win a skirmish—or a little battle, like the one back there with the demi-corps that you got your brevet-majorship for—or same other small, third-rate fight. And then they go to work and thrash us in all the other big battles and turn our campaigns upside down.
“Except out West. There our boys are winning all right. But here we get all the lickings. Isn’t the Army of the Potomac good for anything except for the Rebels to trounce? Is it going to be like this all the time? That’s what I want to know.”
Dad’s face was very grave as he listened. Now he laid aside his pipe and made answer, with none of the former whimsicality in his voice.