The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

by Tim Egan

The soldiers were moved like set pieces within a set piece, seldom told of the master war game. Generals drew up schemes on maps and sent divisions to certain death. Then they reassembled them a few miles away and did it again. As a grunt, you could drop weapons and flee, and many did, but if caught you’d be shot. A man could make $30 for every stray he rounded up for execution. You could feign malaria or typhoid, but it would take an actor of rare skill to pull it off. You could shoot yourself, with a wound of convenience that might be a ticket to a hospital bed. More likely, the self-inflicted tear would kill you, given the high mortality rate in the primitive medical trenches. The best thing to do was to curse and follow orders. The odds of getting out of this thing alive were still better in a soldier’s uniform than a deserter’s rags. As for motivation, whatever Meagher had said at Jones’s Woods or the 7th Regiment Armory was now vapor. Survival was the only reason to expose a face to a shower of musketry.