Going home, home, home. How remarkable if we pass through Gettysburg. Have Colonel Baxter and the adjutant to supper, and see that Gretel cooks some chickens in the German way.

And now the colonel put a hand on his bridle, and looked very severe. Fanning—you are jaundiced—you look green as a pea-pod. Get into a wagon! “I’m all right, sir,” he heard his own voice squawking, and angrily, because the men were looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes. Each of them had a good sixty pounds of blankets and crackers and tin cups and under-drawers and playing cards and Bibles and India-rubber, strapped to his shoulders. Forty rounds in their car-touches, sixty rounds in their pockets. They were thinking: lie in a wagon.

“Go back to the train, Captain.” Baxter jerked his thumb. “We may need you badly tomorrow.”

Once more he lay in a wagon, rations bubbling in his gullet as if he had never chewed them. The dust found him. He could feel it drifting into his nose. Well, he prided himself, the old man recognizes that I’m of value. Nobody else could handle the company as well as I. Lieutenant Wicks becomes hysterical under fire; the men would suffer if I were killed, or if I died of my snakes and stomach-dwellers. The wagon wheels said: going-home-to-Gettysburg-and-see-your-pretty-wife-going-home-to-Gettysburg-and-spare-your-precious-life. No, he had told the girl from Delaware, I don’t care much about poetry. And here he was, building miles of red-hot poems out of the wheels … He became amazingly hungry, and the only food which he imagined and which he most craved, was sliced radishes and lettuce leaves. With vinegar and sugar. It would be so good; he could eat a barrel of it, if he had some.

In late afternoon he felt much better. The train made a brief halt; Fanning went up to the door of a yellow farmhouse and got some milk. The woman made him pay twenty-five cents in currency for a small pannikin of it, and he wanted to tell her what a wrinkled beast she was. The milk stayed down, and it might placate all impulses in the secret pit of him.

He untied Jinks from the rear of the wagon, watered him at the farmer’s trough, and rode through solid dust to find the Seventy-second. They were just coughing Foorwoord—cha! again. An ambulance came from the north, and a dread story came with it. General Reynolds. Yes, he’s killed. They’ve been fighting along the mountains. No, he was only wounded. You’re crazier than a hoot-owl; the driver told me; he was dead. There the ambulance goes, back there. The men kept turning and looking back.