And yet, as I said at the beginning, we were all well used to seeing men killed.
BILLY GOODWIN
I NEVER have known whether Billy Goodwin was a brave man or not.
He was certainly not afraid of anything; but the absence of fear from his composition was so complete that I was always in doubt whether he was entitled to credit for never yielding to that emotion.
His fearlessness seemed like the color of his sandy hair and his pale blue eyes—something over which he had no control.
At Cold Harbor, in 1864, when an artillery duel was going on, plus a tremendous sharp-shooter fire, Billy, with his back to the enemy, lazily lounged upon the breastworks. All the rest of us were crouching behind them.
I remember as an incident that he was eating a sandwich. It was composed of two halves of a hard-tack biscuit and a slice of raw pickled pork—his entire rations for the day. He was carefully holding his hand under his chin, in order to save all the crumbs. We weren’t wasting crumbs in those days.
A lieutenant, who had already been mentioned in orders for gallantry, cautiously pushed up his head to peer over the breastworks on which Goodwin was sitting. Billy placed his hand upon the prematurely bald head of the lieutenant, shoved him down, and said: “Keep below the dirt, or you’ll get a bullet through your billiard ball. Don’t you know this is no time to be exposing yourself?”
I have elsewhere celebrated Billy. In doing so I have suggested that, while he had a high sense of personal duty, he had no sense whatever of personal danger.
On that terrible 30th of August, 1864, when the mine was exploded at Petersburg, Goodwin was detailed to act as courier for General Lee and General Beauregard.