he short block and the long, as well as on those
horseback tours which every second or third morning we were supposed to
take, the major was his especial target. He loved to pick on him, to
tell him that he was "nearly all guts"--a phrase which literally
sickened me at that time--to ask him how he expected to stay in the army
if he couldn't do this or that, what good was he to the army, how could
any soldier respect a thing like him, and so on _ad infinitum_ until,
while at first I pitied the major, later on I admired his pluck. Culhane
foisted upon him his sorriest and boniest nag, the meanest animal he
could find, yet he never complained; and although he forced on him all
the foods he knew the major could not like, still there was no
complaint; he insisted that he should be out and around of an afternoon
when most of us lay about, allowed him no drinks whatever, although he
was accustomed to them. The major, as I learned afterwards, stayed not
six but twelve weeks and passed the tests which permitted him to remain
in the army.

But to return to Culhane himself. The latter's method always contained
this element of nag and pester which, along with his brazen reliance on
and pride in his brute strength at sixty, made all these others look so
puny and ineffectual. They might have brains and skill but here they
were in his institution, more or less undone nervously and physically,
and here he was, cold, contemptuous, not caring much whether they came,
stayed or went, and laughing at them even as they raged. Now and then it
was rumored that he found some single individual in whom he would take
an interest, but not often. In the main I think he despised them one and
all for the puny machines they were. He even despised life and the
pleasures and dissipations or swinish indolence which, in his judgment,
characterized most men. I recall once, for instance, his telling us how
as a private in the United States Army when the division of which he was
a unit was shut up in winter quarters, huddled about stoves, smoking (as
he characterized them) "filthy pipes" or chewing tobacco and spitting,
actually lousy, and never changing their clothes for weeks on end--how
he, revolting at all this and the disease and fevers ensuing, had kept
out of doors as much as possible, even in the coldest weather, and
finding no other way of keeping clean the single shift of underwear and
the one uniform he possessed he had, every other day or so, washe