“Yes, it’s a funny army. There don’t seem to be but one thing that discourages it, and that’s not fightin’. Keep ’em still in camp where you’d think they’d be comfortable and they go to pieces every time. It’s when they’re lyin’ still we have the worst camp fever and the most deserters. Keep ’em on the move, let ’em think they’re goin’ to have a fight and they perk up right off. “We can’t fail with men like that. Make all the mistakes we can, they’ll make up for ’em. The hope of this war is in the common soldiers, not in the generals--not in the War Department, not in me. It’s in the boys. Sometimes it seems to me that nobody sees it quite right. It’s in war as it is in life--a whole raft of men work day and night and sweat and die to get in the crops and mine the ore and build the towns and sail the seas. They make the wealth but they get mighty little of it. We ain’t got our values of men’s work figured out right yet--the value of the man that gives orders and of the man that takes ’em. I hear people talkin’ as if the history of a battle was what the generals did. I can’t help thinkin’ that the history of this war is in the knapsack of the common soldier. He’s makin’ that history just like the farmers are makin’ the wealth. We fellows at the top are only usin’ what they make. “At any rate that’s the way I see it, and I’ve tried hard ever since I’ve been down here to do all I could for the boys. I know lots of officers think I peek around camp too much, think ’tain’t good for discipline. But I’ve always felt I ought to know how they was livin’ and there didn’t seem to be no other sure way of findin’ out. Officers ain’t always good housekeepers, and I kinda felt I’d got to keep my eye on the cupboard. “I reckon Stanton thinks I’ve interfered too much, but there’s been more’n enough trouble to go around in this war, and the only hope was helpin’ where you could. But ’tain’t much one can do. I can no more help every soldier that comes to me in trouble than I can dip all the water out of the Potomac with a teaspoon.