The Deserter Read Online Free

his trouble was a savage nip on the arm.
    The booming of the guns was louder now, but the countryside was still green and fair, the corn tall in the fields, the farmhouses neat with white fences and flowering gardens. And then there was another halt. What was the matter now?
    Otis’s friend Rufus soon found out. “It’s them generals,” he said. “It’s them stuck-up generals.”
    Otis climbed a tree and stared toward the head of the line. Sure enough, a mounted courier was dashing up and shouting something at General Slocum, and whatever it was, the general didn’t like it. From his vantage point in the tree, Otis could see Slocum’s red and furious face. More couriers came and went. Orderlies and officers gathered urgently around.
    Otis climbed down and reported, “It’s some kind of puffed-up standoff.” Rufus said that the general must have a boil on his backside, and the men all grinned and filed off into a field and sat down. The crash of artillery was very loud now, and half the sky was filled with smoke. Something very bad was going on over there, just out of sight to the west.
    Whatever it was, they were in no hurry to find out. Some of Otis’s messmates stretched out and went to sleep. Others filled their canteens from the creek that ran through the field. Rufus took off one shoe and mended his sock. His brother Lem removed his shirt to look for critters.
    But before long Tom ordered everybody up, because the corps was finally on the march again. One way or another, the dispute had been settled. The men plodded on for a while, then turned off the pike onto a narrow country road, their sweltering coats and sweating faces covered with dust. Soon all three brigades of the First Division surged into a wooded grove and came to a halt. At last Tom Robeson told his company they could settle down.
    Otis watched as Tom spread a map on the ground and dropped to his knees. Seth Morgan and Charley Mudge were also kneeling. They were all staring intently at the map.
    Otis envied them their comradeship in important matters, their friendly decision making, their power to send underlings like himself into battle. As officers they were a breed apart.
    The years at school had been so different. Of course the others had never been in danger of expulsion—oh, no, not they, not Mudge and Robeson and Morgan, not Tom Fox. Poor old Otis had been perpetually in the bad graces of tutors, professors, the President and Fellows and all the other lords of the universe, but among his friends it had not mattered at all.
    Why should their army rank make such a difference? Otis himself had not changed. He was as ready as ever to amuse, to dash off a comic song, to rally the campfire with “Hardtack, Come Again No More,” to conduct a mock burial for an ancient piece of salt beef, to spread a little cheer. But now the pall of war had cast a grim shadow over the faces of Tom Robeson and Charley Mudge. Even with Seth the old camaraderie was not the same. It was painfully clear that on the field of glory, comic songs were not what was wanted.
    He watched Tom Robeson look up and point at a rise of ground, over there beyond the trees. He heard him say, “Culp’s Hill” before staring down at the map again with Charley Mudge.
    Otis felt an impulse to shout at them, “Mrs. Jarley’s Waxwork, remember, Tom? Hey, Charley, will you ever forget Aunt Charlotte’s Maid ?”
    But it was no use. Privates did not jest and pass the time of day with lordly colonels and captains, no matter how chummy they had been in the past.
    Fortunately Otis had fostered a friendship with two younger men in his company. Rufus and Lemuel Scopes were a pair of nineteen-year-old twins from some one-horse town in western Massachusetts. Keeping Rufe and Lem in stitches was child’s play.
    But now, Christ, their respite was over. An orderly appeared, Tom and Charley stood up, and before anybody