Somehow or other, the talk had flowed and eddied by winding ways to the subject of cowardice, and Judge Priest had said that every brave man was a coward and every coward was a brave man--it all depended on the time and the place--and this had moved Captain Shelby Woodward to repeat one of his staple chronicles--when the occasion suited he always told it. It concerned that epic last year of the Orphan Brigade--his brigade he always called it, as though he'd owned it. “More than five thousand of us in that brigade of mine, when we went out in '61,” he said, “and not quite twelve hundred of us left on that morning in May of '64 when we marched out of Dalton--Joe Johnston's rear guard, holding Sherman back. Holding him back? Hah, feeding ourselves to him; that was it, sir--just feeding ourselves to him a bite at a time, so as to give the rest of the army a chance for its life. And what does that man Shaler say--what does he say and prove it by the figures? One hundred and twenty solid days of fighting and marching and retreating--one hundred and forty days that were like a hot red slice carved out of hell--fighting every day and mighty near every hour, hanging on Sherman's flanks and stinging at him like gadflies and being wiped out and swallowed in mouthfuls. A total, sir, of more than 1800 deadly, or disabling wounds for us in those hundred and twenty days, or more than a wound apiece if every man had been wounded, and there were less than fifty of the boys that weren't wounded at that. And in September, at the end of those hundred and twenty days, just 240 of us left out of what had been five thousand three years before--240 out of what had been nearly twelve hundred in May--240 out of a whole brigade, infantry, and artillery--but still fighting and still ready to keep right on fighting. Those are Shaler's figures, and he was a Federal officer himself, and a most gallant gentleman. And it is true, sir--every word of it is true. “Now was that bravery? Or was it just pure doggedness? And when you come right down to it, what is the difference between the two? This one thing I do know, though--if it was bravery we were no braver than the men who fought us and chased us and killed us off on that campaign to Atlanta and then on down to the Sea and if it was doggedness, they'd have been just as dogged as we were with the conditions reversed--them losing and us winning. When you're the underdog you just naturally have to fight--there's nothing else for you to do--isn't that true in your experience, Billy?”