“Boy,” I said, “I’m going to send you back to Company L.”
Boys can do us more good above ground. If a man had more than one life to live, I believe a little hanging would not hurt him too much...but he has one life.
Nothing exhausts me more than death sentences, death warrants, death. Young life is priceless. There are thirty million people involved in this war. Youth must be considered, if we are to survive.
I want to write something about my old friend, the Virginian, Ward Hill Lamon, of Danville days. Hill is my volunteer guardian, spy, Rabelaisian crony, scribe. Time and again he bundles up and sleeps all night in the hall outside my bedroom door, a derringer at hand. He is constantly alarmed I may be assassinated. He upbraids me when I ride alone in the White House carriage.
“That stupid coachman can’t look after you... I want a dozen or half-dozen cavalrymen to attend you.”
Evenings, Hill may appear and size me up, and sing a sad little song or a bobtail-nag melody, thrumming his banjo. Husky, courageous, he befriends me every day. Breakfasting together, he has a kernel of advice for me, I’m sure.
I have borrowed his hat, borrowed his cloak, but not his boots.
“As President, it is incumbent on you to look after your own boots and your own umbrellas,” he says.
As warden he has problems with both North and South; it aggravates him when he has to confer with me; he wants to be the little eagle. On our frequent visits to the hospitals he is always sympathetic. “Somebody’s Wallace,” he says, remembering one of my stories. Playing his banjo he will sing “Picayune Butler,” his southern accent warm and beautiful, delighting the sick and wounded.