The Lost Army

|Let’s go and enlist!”“Perhaps they won’t take us,” was the reply.“Well, there ‘s nothing like trying,” responded the first speaker.“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”“That’s so,” said the other. “And if we can’t go for soldiers, perhapsthey ‘ll find us useful about the camp for something else.”This conversation took place between two boys of Dubuque, Iowa, onepleasant morning early in the year 1861. They were Jack Wilson andHarry Fulton, neither of whom had yet seen his sixteenth birthday. Theywere the sons of industrious and respectable parents, whose houses stoodnot far apart on one of the humbler streets of that ambitious city; theyhad known each other for ten years or more, had gone to school together,played together, and at the time of which we are writing they wereworking side by side in the same shop.The war for the destruction of the Union on the one hand and itspreservation on the other had just begun. The election of AbrahamLincoln....