At the word of command he knelt upon the coffin and folded his arms across his chest. Again at the word of command twelve soldiers stepped out in front of him with guns in their hands. Six of these guns carried ball cartridges, and six were blank. No man in the firing squad was permitted to know whether his gun had a bullet in it or not. The officer in command spoke scarcely above his breath, but so hushed was the time that his words were audible to the three thousand men there assembled, as he said to each alternate man: “Fire at his head,” and to the intervening man: “Fire at his chest.” Then turning his back, which was perhaps not an officer-like thing to do, the lieutenant gave in a husky voice the word of command. “Ready, aim, fire.” There was a sharp crack from twelve rifles fired simultaneously. There was a whirr and whistle of six bullets that had passed through the head or chest of the doomed man, and hurtled off into the fields beyond. Army rifles fire with tremendous force. The dead man’s body rose to its feet and fell limply forward. Five minutes later all that was left of Youngblood was buried beneath six feet of earth. There was no merriment in any of the camps that day, or the next, or the next. Even our scant rations were not much relished by those of us who had witnessed this scene. And yet, as I said at the beginning, we were all well used to seeing men killed. BILLY GOODWIN I never have known whether Billy Goodwin was a brave man or not. He was certainly not afraid of anything; but the absence of fear from his composition was so complete that I was always in doubt whether he was entitled to credit for never yielding to that emotion. His fearlessness seemed like the color of his sandy hair and his pale blue eyes--something over which he had no control. At Cold Harbor, in 1864, when an artillery duel was going on, plus a tremendous sharp-shooter fire, Billy, with his back to the enemy, lazily lounged upon the breastworks. All the rest of us were crouching behind them. I remember as an incident that he was eating a sandwich. It was composed of two halves of a hard-tack biscuit and a slice of raw pickled pork--his entire rations for the day. He was carefully holding his hand under his chin, in order to save all the crumbs. We weren’t wasting crumbs in those days. A lieutenant, who had already been mentioned in orders for gallantry, cautiously pushed up his head to peer over the breastworks on which Goodwin was sitting. Billy placed his hand upon the prematurely bald head of the lieutenant, shoved him down, and said: “Keep below the dirt, or you’ll get a bullet through your billiard ball. Don’t you know this is no time to be exposing yourself?” I have elsewhere celebrated Billy. In doing so I have suggested that, while he had a high sense of personal duty, he had no sense whatever of personal danger.