appealed to me in terms which I could not withstand, and came in like
Kane to do his full duty as a trooper, and like Kane to win his
commission by the way he thus did his duty.

I felt many qualms at first in allowing men of this stamp to come in,
for I could not be certain that they had counted the cost, and was
afraid they would find it very hard to serve--not for a few days, but
for months--in the ranks, while I, their former intimate associate,
was a field-officer; but they insisted that they knew their minds, and
the events showed that they did. We enlisted about fifty of them from
Virginia, Maryland, and the Northeastern States, at Washington. Before
allowing them to be sworn in, I gathered them together and explained
that if they went in they must be prepared not merely to fight, but to
perform the weary, monotonous labor incident to the ordinary routine
of a soldier's life; that they must be ready to face fever exactly as
they were to face bullets; that they were to obey unquestioningly, and
to do their duty as readily if called upon to garrison a fort as if
sent to the front. I warned them that work that was merely irksome and
disagreeable must be faced as readily as work that was dangerous, and
that no complaint of any kind must be made; and I told them that they
were entirely at liberty not to go, but that after they had once
signed there could then be no backing out.

Not a man of them backed out; not one of them failed to do his whole
duty.

These men formed but a small fraction of the whole. They went down to
San Antonio, where the regiment was to gather and where Wood preceded
me, while I spent a week in Washington hurrying up the different
bureaus and telegraphing my various railroad friends, so as to insure