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interpret the Text Using Close reading
aCTiViTY 1.3
continued
26 “All right Joby, don’t stir.” A hand pressed his chest gently and the boy relaxed. “How long you been with us, Joby?”
27 “Three weeks, sir.”
28 “Run off from home or joined legitimately, boy?”
29 Silence.
30 “. . . Fool question,” said the general. “Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a ...
fool. There’s your cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older. Raw, raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day, Joby?”
31 “I think so, sir.”
32 “You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.”
33 “You, sir?”
34 “It’s the truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side
will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.”
35 Yes, sir,” said Joby.
36 The general must have taken out a cigar now, for the dark was suddenly filled
with the smell of tobacco unlit as yet, but chewed as the man thought what next to say.
37 “It’s going to be a crazy time,” said the general. “Counting both sides, there’s a hundred thousand men, give or take a few thousand out there tonight, not one as can spit a sparrow off a tree, or knows a horse clod from a Minié ball. Stand up, bare the breast, ask to be a target, thank them and sit down, that’s us, that’s them. We should turn tail and train four months, they should do the same. But here we are, taken with spring fever and thinking it blood lust, taking our sulfur with cannons instead of with molasses, as it should be, going to be a hero, going to live forever. And I can see all of them over there nodding agreement, save the other way around. It’s wrong, boy, it’s wrong as a head put on hindside front and a man marching backward through life...More innocents will get shot out of pure ... enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow, not caring where the tide takes them.”
38 The general stopped and made a little pile of winter leaves and twigs in the darkness, as if he might at any moment strike fire to them to see his way through the coming days when the sun might not show its face because of what was happening here and just beyond.
39 The boy watched the hand stirring the leaves and opened his lips to say something, but did not say it. The general heard the boy’s breath and spoke himself.
40 “Why am I telling you this? That’s what you wanted to ask, eh? Well, when you got a bunch of wild horses on a loose rein somewhere somehow you got to bring order, rein them in. These lads, fresh out of the milkshed, don’t know what I know, and I can’t tell them: men actually die in war. So each is his own army. I got to make one army of them. And for that, boy, I need you.
41 “Me!” The boy’s lips barely twitched.
My Notes
Unit 1 • The Challenge of Heroism • Part 1: “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh” 7
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