One Wounded Soldier’s View
•“Every Sunday there were half a dozen old roosters who would come into my ward and preach and pray and sing to us, while we were swearing to ourselves all the time, and wishing the blamed old fools would go away. Walt Whitman’s funny stories, and his pipes and tobaccos, were worth more than all the preachers and tracts in Christendom.”
From Roy Morris’s The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford U P, 2001).