| Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Cornhuskers. 1918. |
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| 95. House |
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| TWO Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe. | |
| Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is dead, his only son is dead, and his two daughters in Missouri and Texas don’t want him around. | |
| The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass. | |
| Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and killed many Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory told about in the histories in school. | |
| Joe takes a piece of carpenter’s chalk, draws lines on the floor and piles stove wood to show where six regiments were slaughtered climbing a slope. | 5 |
| “Here they went” and “Here they went,” says Joe, and the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass. | |
| The two Swede boys go downstairs with a big blur of guns, men, and hills in their heads. They eat herring and potatoes and tell the family war is a wonder and soldiers are a wonder. | |
| One breaks out with a cry at supper: I wish we had a war now and I could be a soldier. | |
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