Will Kirkpatrick

@keepitscruffy.bsky.social

397 Followers 233 Following

Biology PhD Candidate @ The U of Arkansas 🐗 B.S. @ The U of Tennessee 🍊🏈 Civil War Buff, Vols, Birds, Progressive, Proud Appalachian 🔵

Danger and death were commonplace. At Barker's Mill Pond one of Bir-ney's brigadiers watched a Confederate artillery round land in a party of men bathing and washing their clothes. "The boys just looked around and continued to bathe and wash as though nothing had happened," he wrote home. "Such is war. So accustomed do we become to such scenes that we can brave danger to an extent almost incredible." Three miles north an officer eating lunch inspected a piece of bark and discovered that it was really a skull fragment covered with hair, blood, and maggots. "They're at dinner, too," he remarked as he finished his meal. "Thus does soldiering make the stomachs of men imper-turbable." A newspaperman riding behind Hancock's and Wright's lines was surprised at how immune the soldiers had become to their exposure to death. "In the third line of breastworks, where shells were liable to alight any moment, and in the second, where musket balls were intruding themselves constantly, men were writing letters, playing cards, cooking meals or eating them, doing anything and everything that men would do anywhere else, and doing it with a sang froid that was delightful."68
Photo of President James Garfield, the 20th US President
Photo of President James Garfield, the 20th US President
Photo of General James Garfield, the 20th US President, in Union uniform
Photo of President James Garfield, the 20th US President