Streets of Laredo

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call)

She didn’t know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn’t want to touch it or even look at it.

Not too many men, in his experience, had achieved a great thing, even one. Very few ever achieved more than one, he knew.

Still, he was a salaried man. Even though Katie, who had been a good wife, was dead, he was not his own master.

He was just a husband and a salaried man. Choice didn’t play any part in his life.

There was no degree of competence that would assure anyone of survival, and no scale that would tell a commander which man would live and which man would die.

It seemed to him the highest principle, loyalty. He preferred it to honor. He had never been exactly sure what men meant when they spoke of their honor, though it had been a popular word during the time of the War. He was sure, though, what he meant when he spoke of loyalty. A man didn’t desert his comrades, his troop, his leader. If he did he was, in Call’s book, worthless.