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Updated: July 24, 2025
That was all. My brain was still halting, so I turned to Francis. Here again I had to go back. Francis, rejected on all sides for active service, owing to what he scornfully used to call "the shirkers' ailment, varicose veins," had flatly declined to carry on with his motor business after Dicky had joined up, although their firm was doing government work.
One or two glances at Colonel Cleaves, when he was talking earnestly, were enough to show the observer that this officer meant all he said. Shirkers, among either officers or men, would receive scant consideration in his regiment. Camp Berry, at which the Ninety-ninth and the Hundredth were stationed, lay in one of the prettiest parts of Georgia.
"I knew of Kore I had heard of him and his shirkers' and deserters' agency in my travels and I went straight to him. He sent me to Haase's ... this was towards the end of June. It was when I was at Haase's that I sent out that message to van Urutius that fell into your hands. That happened like this.
Frank Wilkeson's "Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac" is a true voice from the ranks when he explains "how the resort to volunteering, the unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians, ground up the choicest seedcorn of the nation; how it consumed the young, the patriotic, the intelligent, the generous, and the brave; and how it wasted the best moral, social, and political elements of the Republic, leaving the cowards, shirkers, egotists, and moneymakers to stay at home and procreate their kind."
I am describing it to try if possible to raise a blush of shame on the faces of those shirkers at home who are a disgrace to the name of Englishman. Tom passed through this ordeal without a scratch, and by and by when his company was relieved, and he returned to a place of safety, the whole episode seemed but a ghastly dream. And yet it caused a great change to Tom's life.
But instead they had found a whole fabric of interwoven questions amusements, wages, competition, cooperation, ignorance, vulgarity, vice, cheapness, trickery, "business is business." True, they had found more honest businesses than shady ones, more faithful clerks than shirkers, more decent people in the pleasure resorts than doubtful people.
As the sun rose higher, so did Kate's temper, and her voice grew sharper and more imperious each time she spoke to the shirkers. The fact that the present task was necessary, because of carelessness on their part, did not tend to increase her tolerance. Bunch, herding a band of yearlings, had allowed them to get back to their mothers.
Running most of the time, chattering all the time, snatching the boards from each other's backs as if they were some coveted treasure, getting up eager rivalries between different companies, pouring great choruses of ridicule on the heads of all shirkers, they made the whole scene so enlivening that I gladly stayed out in the moonlight for the whole time to watch it.
The best human combination of head and heart and hand was sure to come to the top. The others would also find their own appropriate levels. But shirkers, growlers, flinchers, and mutineers were given short shrift. The officers were game to the death and never hesitated to use handspikes, fists, or firearms whenever the occasion required it.
Excitable old gentlemen who believe that they can decide at a glance whether a man is medically fit, and write to the Press about the "shirkers" they think they have detected, were of the opinion, long since, that the R.A.M.C. should be combed out. Certain journals made a great feature of this proposal.
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