The American: A Middle Western Legend Read Online Free Page B

him into ranks, then marched under directions of his sergeant down to the river and kept his station there all night long.
    He might have taken great pride in the fact that he was not a worse soldier than most, but the next day he came down with fever, and both pride and confidence disappeared in a malarial oven. For two days he lay in his damp tent, shivering, pleading for blankets to keep himself warm, while his brief glory died away, while his brief manhood changed itself into the adolescent whimpering of a halfgrown boy. During much of that time, the tall parson who had given him the book sat beside him and begged him to prepare himself to leave this world and enter the next; but Pete’s good nature had gone, and he snarled back like a cornered animal. The sergeant tried to find a doctor for him, but when two days had passed with no hope of getting a medical man, they gave it up and carried him by litter to the nearest field hospital.
    Afterward, there were two reasons for his not remembering the days in the field hospital any too well; for one thing, much of the time he had a raging fever; for another, the things he saw at the field hospital, in between his spells of delirium, were not good to remember. When he was conscious and clearheaded, he saw them bringing in the battle cases from the south, men in blood-soaked bandages, men without hands and without feet, men who screamed with pain, and men who wept. The doctors, in their filthy, blood-stained aprons, reminded him of the farmers at home when hog-killing time came, and once, when the man next to him died of a hemorrhage, blood spilling from his lips all over the sheet and bed, and lay all night beside him, a corpse, the hard thing inside of Pete broke, shattered entirely, and let him weep the way he had never wept before.
    His delirium was to be preferred, for then he went back to the forest where all was still, and the boughs overhead a high roof, and the soft south wind humming way up above, and there was not one girl with golden hair but a thousand, and all the mingled images of his dreams came together into splendid structures.
    After two weeks, he was pronounced cured and told to go and join his regiment again.

X
    For Pete, the war was as permanent a condition of life as any he could imagine. It seemed to him sometimes that there was never a time when there had not been a war, nor did he speculate a great deal on what would become of him when the war was done. He had not written home because there was no one there he desired to hear from, and he had never received a letter from home. Thus, when it came to an end so suddenly, his regiment demobilized and sent home, he could not react the way most of the men did, whooping, shouting, paying fantastic sums for bad liquor. What a war, what a war! No real battles, none of the stuff like Gettysburg or The Wilderness, none of that, but still they were soldiers, and that was something for a man to look back on. It was not something for Pete to look back on. Marching north to Washington, he was silent in the ranks of singing, happy men—“Farewell, mother, you may never press me to your heart again; But oh, you’ll not forget me mother, if I’m numbered with the slain”—derisive and contemptuous; but he was silent, facing not the inverted joy of his comrades, but the inverted tragedy of his own rejection from the only good life he had known.

XI
    The farm was different, the people different. He had come home, not out of deep desire, but like an animal who knows only one burrow. He had come home in a uniform, and he stood among his family as a stranger, looking at his brothers and sisters as if he had not seen them before, looking at the worn woman who was his mother, at the father. The very phrase and threat and anger of fatherhood was gone; old Altgeld was a man no taller than Pete, no stronger. He watched his son almost with apprehension, and the mother showed plainly how much she wanted