The River Between Us Warfare Quotes

They'd divvied up, some for the North, more for the South. Why didn't they just fight it out right here in the road, fair and square? Did they even know it could end with them killing one another in some godforsaken loblolly far from home? (2.42)

The minute Mama heard that the cotton states were seceding, she feared anew for Noah.

Then this month when Little Napoleon Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, the whole sky darkened. Another week and Lincoln had proclaimed his blockade of the Southern ports. Now he was calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to fight. (3.8-9)

And the boats still came. We didn't know how quiet the first weeks of war can be. We had no experience of war. (6.2)

They issued them no weapons up at Camp Dunlap, and no uniforms either. Noah wrote to say the legs of his butternut jeans were growing beards. They were given rations of salt pork and dry beans to cook for themselves if they could, or eat raw. That and thirteen dollars a month was their pay.

It was an army that didn't know how to be an army, and it treated its soldiers like beasts of the field. (9.4-5)

But everybody said that our war, the war on the river, would be waged from Cairo. In our ignorance we still couldn't believe they'd send boys unprepared into battle, though I suppose Cass knew better, in the way she knew things. (9.8)

People swarmed wherever you looked. Men mainly, of every age. Most were in uniform or parts of uniform. Some went about their business, but more of them were drunk—reeling drunk and fighting drunk and sleeping it off with their boots in the ditches and their heads cradled in filth.

"They train on the parade grounds all morning," the doctor said, "but nobody can decide what to do with them the rest of the day. The able-bodied." (10.26-27)

"Military justice is rough justice," Dr. Hutchings said, "or no justice at all." But he went on to say he'd end up in uniform, doctoring for the army. He had thought he'd do more good as a "contract surgeon," a civilian doctor, but he was finding out different. (10.42)

He stands between us in his forage cap, proud in his big new uniform that he seems to be peering out of, not wearing. But his arms hang stiff at his sides, the cuffs to his knuckles, a soldier boy before the battle. There's something missing in his eyes, a vacancy, as if he couldn't wait and has gone on ahead. (13.4)

We pushed forward in the mob when the first gangplank came down. The able-bodied carried the wounded on litters. Now we saw sights we'd been spared in the hospital tent. Blood soaked through the stretchers from the stumps of legs until the gangplank ran with it. We heard the cries of the torn and saw a boy who'd been shot full in the face. But it wasn't Noah because this boy's matted hair was black.

No one had witnessed the fruits of war till now. Men in the crowd wept like children. Women shrieked and keened and fell on their knees. But we didn't. We might miss Noah. (13.19-20)

"You'll think I'm too old for a soldier," he said, "and maybe I am. But they'll need doctors. I didn't want to spring it on you at the last minute. You'd have to take over at home till I got back, be there for your mother and the boys."

In the quiet, I heard my dad waiting. He wanted it to be all right with me. He wanted my approval. Nothing this grown-up had happened to me before. This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand—how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him. (15.47-48)