The idea of a Thanksgiving dinner for half a million men by sea and land fascinated Charley’s imagination, and cheered him mightily. But I could not see that his strength increased, as he often alleged.
"Ned, you bet I’ll be on hand when them turkeys are served out," he would say. "You won’t need to carry my Thanksgiving dinner up from Brownie’s. Say, ain’t it bully for the folks at home to be giving us a Thanksgiving like this? Turkeys, sausages, mince-pies! They say there’s going to be apples and celery for all hands!"
"Able! Of course I’ll be able! I’ll be just as spry as you be on Thanksgiving. See if I don’t carry my own turkey all right. Yes, by gum, if it weighs twenty pounds!"
"No, eh? Well, that’s what I figure on. Half a turkey, anyhow. Got to be; besides chickens, hams, sausages, and all that kind of fixin’s. You heard what Bill Sylvester’s girl wrote from Philamadink-a-daisy-oh? No, eh? Well, he come in a-purpose to read me the letter. Says there’s going to be three or four hundred thousand turkeys, besides them fixin’s! Sherman’s boys can’t get any; they’re marched too far away, out of reach. The Shenandoah boys’ll get some, and Butler’s crowd, and us chaps, and the blockading squadrons. Bill’s girl says so. We’ll get the whole lot between us. Four hundred thousand turkeys! Of course there’ll be a turkey apiece; there’s got to be, if there’s any sense in arithmetic. Oh, I’ll be choosin’ between breast-meat and hind-legs on Thanksgiving,—you bet your sweet life on that!"
This expectation that there would be a turkey apiece was not shared by Company I; but no one denied it in Charley’s hearing. The boy held it as sick people often do fantastic notions, and all fell into the humor of strengthening the reasoning on which he went.
It was clear that no appetite for turkey moved my poor "buddy," but that his brain was busy with the "whole-turkey-a-piece" idea as one significant of the immense liberality of the folks at home, and their absorbing interest in the army.
"Where’s there any nation that ever was that would get to work and fix up four hundred thousand turkeys for the boys?" he often remarked, with ecstatic patriotism.
I have often wondered why "Bill Sylvester’s girl" gave that flourishing account of the preparations for our Thanksgiving dinner. It was only on searching the newspaper files recently that I surmised her sources of information. Newspapers seldom reached our regiment until they were several weeks old, and then they were not much read, at least by me. Now I know how enthusiastic the papers of November, ’64, were on the great feast for the army.