THE GLORY OF WAR
By M. B. Levick
He was an orderly in the hospital and had got the job through a friend in his Grand Army Post. The work was not for a fastidious man, but John was not fastidious. In his duties he affected the bluff manner of a veteran, and, peering at the internes with a wise squint, would say, “Oh, this ain’t nothin’; an old soldier is used to such things. If y’ want t’ see the real thing, jus’ go to war.” And he would laugh at them and they would laugh at him.
He wore his G. A. R. emblem conspicuously on all occasions. At the slightest chance he became a bore with long tales of fighting, of how he had chased Johnny Reb and how those were the days. The students, still near enough to the classroom to hold a lingering repugnance for the text-books’ overemphasis on the Civil War, would guy him, but John never suspected.
On Decoration Day he marched and attended as many exercises as he could squeeze into the too short hours. He wore a committee ribbon like a decoration for valour. Once he carried a flag in a parade, and for weeks talked about Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, and regimental colours that had changed hands in distant frays.
And he had fought only to save his country, he would assert. He didn’t have no eye on Uncle Sam’s purse, not he; he could take care of himself, and if not, why, there was them as would. When the youths accused him of sinking his pension, he turned hotly to remind them of their lack of beard.
He was ever so ready to defend himself with an ancient vigour that the students and the nurses were sorry when he fell ill. Perhaps his campaigning had taken from his vitality, they surmised. The house surgeon told them he would never get up. After that—and the afterward was not long—John told his tales to more sober auditors.
He had been in bed a week and had begun to suspect the state of affairs when he called to him one evening the youth who of all had shown him the most deference.
“Sit down,” he said, without looking the youngster in the eye; and for a time there were heard only the noises of the day-weary ward. Presently John spoke, in an apprehensive tone of confidences.
“I’ve been a soldier now for forty-five years,” he said, “an’ for once I want to be just myself.... I kind o’ like you, an’ there ain’t nobody else I can talk to, for I ain’t got any one....