John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life

[222] mingled feelings of pleasure and sadness: pleasure at their comrade's good-fortune and downright enjoyment of his treasure, and sadness at their own lonely condition, with no one to remember them in this pleasant manner, and often would their eyes fill with tears by the contrast of their own situation with the pleasant scene before them. But these men were generally remembered by a liberal donation whenever a box came to camp.

Still, there were selfish men in every company, and, if they were selfish by nature, the war, I think, had a tendency to make them more so. Such men would keep their precious box and its precious contents away from sight, smell, and taste of all outsiders. It was a little world to them, and all their own. “Send for a box yourself, if you want one,” appeared in their every look, and often found expression in words. As a boy I have seen a school-mate munching an apple before now with two or three of his less favored acquaintances wistfully watching and begging for the core. But the men of whom I speak never had any core to their apples; they absorbed everything that was sent them.

I knew one man who, I think, came uncomfortably near belonging to this class of soldiers. The first box he ever received contained, among other delicacies, about a peck of raw onions. Before these onions had been reached in this man's consumption of the contents of his box a move was ordered. What was to be done? It was one of the trying moments of his life. Nineteen out of every twenty men, if not ninety-nine out of every hundred, would at this eleventh hour have set them outside of the tent and said, “Here they are, boys. Take hold and help yourselves!” But not he. He was the hundredth man, the exception. So, packing them up with some old clothes, he at once expressed them back to his home. But, as I have intimated, such men were few in number, and, while war made this class more selfish, yet its community of hardship and danger and suffering developed sympathy and large-hearted generosity among