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The Hero Of Company G
by
“You’re excited, Colonel; you forget yourself.”
“I am excited, Major; I’m desperate! Will you walk round the camp with me?”
The end of the colloquy was that the captain saw the major and the colonel and told the first-lieutenant, who told, the first-sergeant, whose name was Spruce. “Captain’s kicked to the colonel, I guess,” says Spruce, “and colonel’s kicked to the major. That’s the talk. Git ready, boys, and pack.” True enough, the camp was moved the very next day.
“I guess captain will make an officer if he lives and don’t git the big head,” Spruce moralized. “It’s mighty prevalent in the volunteers.”
The captain wrote the whole account home to one single confidant–his father–and him he swore to secrecy. The captain’s father was the man who had committed Company G to Spruce’s good offices. He sent a check to the company and a special box of cigars to Spruce. And Spruce, knowing nothing of the intermediary, felt a more brilliant pride in his adopted town, and bragged of its virtues more vehemently than ever. The camp was not moved soon enough. Pneumonia and typhoid fever appeared. One by one the boys of the regiment sickened. Presently one by one they began to die.
Then Spruce suggested to the captain: “I guess I’d be more good in the hospital than I am here, Captain.” And the captain (who was scared, poor lad, and had visions of the boys’ mothers demanding the wasted lives of their sons at his hands) had his best sergeant put on the sick detail. If Spruce had been useful in camp he was invaluable in hospital. The head surgeon leaned on him, with a jest, and the young surgeon in charge with pretense of abuse. “You’ll burst if you don’t work off your steam, Spruce, so out with it. What is it now ?” In this fashion he really sought both information and suggestion. Nor was he above being instructed in the innumerable delicacies of requisitions by the old regular, and he did not, when requisitions were unanswered and supplies appeared in unusual form, ask any embarrassing questions. “I get ’em from the Red Cross, sir,” was Spruce’s invariable and unquestioned formula.
And the doctor in his reports accounted for what he had received and complained lustily because his requisitions were not honored, even as Spruce had desired, and, thereby, he obtained much credit, in the days to come. Spruce did not obtain any particular credit, but he saved a few lives, it is likely; and the sick men found him better than medicine. The captain always handed the committee letters over to him; and bought whatever he desired.
“Captain’s going to distinguish himself, give him a chance,” thought Spruce, “he’s got sense !”
And by degrees he began to feel for the young volunteer a reflection of the worship which had secretly been offered to a certain fat little bald-headed captain of the old –steenth. His picture of the great day when he should have his triumph–quite as dear to him, perhaps, as any Roman general’s to the Roman–now always included a vision of the captain, slender and straight and bright-eyed, at the head of the line; and he always could see the captain, later in the day, presenting him to his father; “Here’s Sergeant Spruce, who has coached us all!” He had overheard those very words once said to a girl visiting the camp, and they clung to his memory with the persistent sweetness of the odor of violets.
To-day he was thinking much more of the captain than of young Danvers, though Danvers ranked next in his good will. Danvers was a college lad who had begged and blustered his mother into letting him go. He would not let her know how ill he was, but had the captain write to his married sister, in the same town but not the same house. She, in sore perplexity, wrote to both the captain and Spruce and kept her trunk packed, expecting a telegram. Danvers used to talk of her and of his mother and of his little nephews and nieces to Spruce, at first in mere broken sentences–this was when he was so ill they expected that he might die any day–later in little happy snatches of reminiscence. He was perfectly aware that he owed his life to Spruce’s nursing; and he gave Spruce the same admiration which he had used to give the great man who commanded the university football team. The social hiatus between them closed up insensibly, as it always does between men who are in danger and suffering together. Danvers knew Spruce’s footfall and his thin face would lighten with a smile whenever the sergeant came in sight. He liked the strong, soft touch of his hand, the soothing cadence of his voice; he felt a gratitude which he was too boyish to express for the comfort of Spruce’s baths and rubbings and cheerfulness. The other sick lads had a touch of the same feeling for the sergeant. As he passed from cot to cot, even the sickest man could make some little sign of relief at his return.