They met Fitz Lee, who was part of Stuart's sabers, and almost cut him to pieces, but they couldn't finish it because the rebel pickets were too close and by then the alarm had been spread. It was a good day and he had thought: This won't be so bad.
Then Chancellorsville. The third night it had been raining hard, but it stopped a matter of minutes after their patrol came in. The rebel artillery started up shortly after this. Whitworths pouring it down from the thicketed heights.
His sergeant had appeared to him in the darkness, in the cold miserable darkness, showing the whites of his eyes with his body tensed stiffly.
"My God, I saw him do it!"
"What?"
"With his own pistol."
"What-damn it!"
The sergeant led him back into a pine stand. Deneen was sitting beneath thick, dripping branches, huddled close to the tree trunk. His pistol was in his hand. And the toe of his right boot was missing-where he had shot it away.
They carried him to the rear and said shrapnel to the orderly who was filling out the tag which was attached to Deneen's tunic. The remainder of the night Flynn did not smile because he was muscle-tight in the mud as A. P. Hill's Whitworths continued to slam down from Hazel Grove.
In the morning he found the sergeant dead; killed in the shelling. And he realized he was the only one who knew about Deneen.
After that he smiled when he felt like smiling.
In the army it wasn't necessary. Most of the time it helped, but it wasn't necessary. He had seen men do more than just smile to wangle a post assignment back East. He had accepted this, regarding it as something contemptible, but still, none of his business. He had accepted this and all of the unmilitary facets of army life because there was nothing he could do about them. The politics could go their smiling, boot-licking way.