The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

the worst kind of Colonial, the sort of man who asserted that because America was new, everything old was bad.

Major Smith bustled into the square, snapping questions without waiting for answers and bringing with him a sense of anxiety that he probably thought of as urgency, if he noticed it at all. I recognized his type immediately, having encountered it among both doctors and military officers. He would never get the best out of his men, and he would never know why.