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...LIFE OF BILLY YANK (454 pp.)-Bell Irvin Wiley-Bobbs-Merrill...
Destiny may have been more casual in those days, but she was just as determined to give a simple soldier an awful tough time. In The Life of Billy Yank, a brother volume to The Life of Johnny Reb (1943), Historian Bell Irvin Wiley recites the hard facts of daily life in the Union armies-or rather, he lets "Billy Yank" do his own talking, through the letters and other scraps of identity he left lying in his prodigious trail...
...Gladness. Off hours, Billy Yank had no U.S.O. He was left to get drunk on any "oil of gladness" he could find, and take what "Horizontal Refreshment" was offered by the droves of easy women who followed his armies. Eighty-two cases of venereal disease were reported annually for every 1,000 soldiers. (In World War II, the average rate for the U.S. Army was 35 cases to 1,000.) For such troubles, as for wounds, Billy was left to the dreadful mercies of a medical system that "operated in old blood-stained and often pusstained coats, [that] knew nothing...
Next day Shuman won another victory: presidency of the union, by a vote of 276 to 264. He is the third Yank to hold...
...good explanation for the disappearance of those Sno-Gos. That is the salutary and invigorating effect of the common snowplow on the activities of local policemen and their minions. At the first signs of snow the minions are out with their tow trucks. "Snow Removal," they mutter, as they yank your car off to their garage, looking nervously over their shoulders for the snout of the all-devouring plow looming up behind a drift. They might as well be looking for a Sno-Go. The tow trucks come and go, but still squatting in the rectangular grimy mounds where...