“Body and spirit both bruised?” said the Surgeon, half reflectively.
Harry colored. “Yes,” he said, rather defiantly. “In addition to desiring to serve my country, I want to vindicate my manhood from some aspersions which have been cast upon it.”
“Quite a fair showing of motives. Better, perhaps, than usual, when a careful weighing of the relative proportions of self-esteem, self-interest and higher impulses is made.”
“I am free to say that the discouragements I have met with are very different, and perhaps much greater than I contemplated. Nor can I bring myself to belive that they are necessary. I am trying to be entirely willing to peril life and limb on the field of battle, but instead of placing me where I can do this, and allowing me to concentrate all my energies upon that object, I am kept for months chafing under the petty tyrannies of a bullying officer, and deprived of most of the comforts that I have heretofore regarded as necessary to my existence. What good can be accomplished by diverting forces which should be devoted to the main struggle into this ignoble channel? That's what puzzles and irritates me.”
“It seems to be one of the inseparable conditions of the higher forms of achievement that they require vastly more preparation for them than the labor of doing them.”
“That's no doubt very philosophical, but it's not satisfactory, for all that.”
“My dear boy, learn this grand truth now: That philosophy is never satisfactory; it is only mitigatory. It consists mainly in saying with many fine words: 'What can't be cured must be endured.'”
“I presume that is so. I wish, though, that by the mere syaing so, I could make the endurance easier.”
“I can make your lot in the service easier.”
“Indeed! how so?”