s-trying period of
meanness and injustice to his comrades, became a rock of strength in
the weeks when all of the others were in physical collapse or coma,
and was made a sergeant because of the nobility of his conduct. Yet
this man's ambition was to be a saloonkeeper in Minneapolis.

There is still an official report on file in the Department of the
Army which describes Sergeant Rice as the "bravest and noblest" of the
Expedition. He is identified with most of its greatest heroisms. The
man was apparently absolutely indomitable and incorruptible. He died
from freezing on a last forlorn mission into the Arctic storm to
retrieve a cache of seal meat for his friends. Fredericks, who had
accompanied him, was so grief-stricken at the tragedy that he
contemplated dying at his side, then reacted in a way which signifies
much in a few words, "Out of the sense of duty I owed my dead comrade,
I stooped and kissed the remains and left them there for the wild
winds of the Arctic to sweep over."

Such briefly were the extremes and the middle ground in this body of
human material. At one end were the amoral characters whose excesses
became steadily worse as the situation blackened. At the other were
Brainard and Rice--good all the way through, absolute in integrity and
adjusted perfectly to other men. In between these wholly contrasting
elements was the group majority, trying to do duty, with varying
degrees of success. That would include Greeley, strong in
self-discipline but likewise brittle. It would include Lieutenant
Lockwood, a lion among men for most of the distance, but totally
downcast and beaten in the last dreadful stretch, Israel, the youngest
of the party who won the love of other men by his frankness and
generosity, Sergeant Gardiner who was always ready to share his scraps
of food with whoever he thought needed them more, Private Whisler who
died begging his comrades to forgive him for having stolen a few
slices of bacon, and Private Bender who alternated between feats of
heroism and acts of miscreancy.

Other than their common experience, there was probably nothing unusual
about this group of men. They were an average slice of American
manpower as found in the services of that day, and in the
fundamentals, men have changed but little since. Those who had the
chance to study American men under the terrible rigor of Japanese
imprisonment during World War II give an analysis not unlike the
chronicles of the Greeley