noons
tarheel camp-sentries and sand-hill street-patrols mistaking the boys for officers , saluting as they passed and always getting an officer 's salute in return ! Hilary seen every day with men high and mighty , who were as quick as the girls to make merry with him , yet always in their merriment seeming , he and they alike , exceptionally upright , downright , heartright , and busy . It kept the boys straight and strong . Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula with that master of strategic ruse , Magruder , but solely in the dreariest hardships of war , minus all the grander sorts that yield glory ; rains , bad food , ill-chosen camps , freshets , terrible roads , horses sick and raw-boned , chills , jaundice , emaciation , barely an occasional bang at the enemy on reconnoissances and picketings , and marches and countermarches through blistering noons and skyless nights , with men , teams , and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst , along with columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying and never fighting . Which things the book bravely makes light of , Hilary maintaining that the battery boys had a spirit to bear them better than most commands did , and the boys reporting -- not to boast the special kindness everywhere of ladies for ladies ' men -- that Hilary himself , oftenest by sunny , but sometimes by cyclonic , treatment of commissaries , quartermasters , surgeons , and citizens , made their burdens trivial . So we , too , lightly pass them . After all , the things most important here are matters not military of which the book does not tell .