“I believe,” he concluded excitedly, “that I shall have to go myself and help lick them consarned Dutch.”
“I wouldn’t,” said mother with a gleam of fun in her eyes, for she liked to tease Bill, “You might wear yourself out, as you did at Bull Run, scampering back.”
“Well,” acknowledged Bill with a grimace, “I am getting old, and I like farmin’ a consarned sight better than I do fightin’; but when I read ’bout them Germans tryin’ to run over everybody, it makes my dander rise, darned if it don’t!” And Bill was not the only one of us who felt that way.
Then we got Bill to tell us about his experience in the Bull Run campaign. So he gave his version of that battle—even the running away, which, however does not concern this narrative.
“Didn’t you think it a shame,” asked mother, “to run away?”
“Well,” admitted Bill, “as a matter of glory it was, but as we fightin’ fellers see it then, it looked like common sense, plagued if it didn’t! A man will get sca’t at things he ain’t used to. Them fellers that run wouldn’t do it again—if the other fellers didn’t. I wouldn’t wonder if I would stand to the rack an’ take the fodder that was coming, myself, if I was in another fight. And then my time was most eout, and I was all the time thinkin’ ’twas best to go home on my legs instead of in a box, when my time was up.”
“Were you scared, Bill?” I asked.
“Gosh, yes! the fust of it, my hair stood up so straight that I thought it would take my hat off. But I had spunk to stand it, in spite of being sca’t—’till the others run. D’ yo’ know that I think it takes more courage f’r a sca’t man to stand fire, than it does for a brave man.”
And I have since learned, from experience, that it is indeed a brave man who, being frightened, still keeps his place in battle.