Similar comments about officers are to be found in the letters of Northern soldiers. A Massachusetts soldier, who seems to have been a Civil War version of Bill Mauldin, wrote: ``The officers consider themselves as made of a different material from the low fellows in the ranks. They get all the glory and most of the pay and don't earn ten cents apiece on the average, the drunken rascals.'' Private George Gray Hunter of Pennsylvania wrote: ``I am well convinced in My own Mind that had it not been for officers this war would have ended long ago.'' Another Yankee became so disgusted as to state: ``I wish to God one half of our officers were knocked in the head by slinging them against [the other half].''

No group of officers came in for more spirited denunciation than the doctors. One Federal soldier wrote: ``The docters is no a conte. hell will be filde with do[c]ters and offersey when this war is over.'' Shortly after the beginning of Sherman's Georgia campaign, an ailing Yank wrote his homefolk: ``The surgeon insisted on Sending me to the hospital for treatment. I insisted on takeing the field and prevailed -- thinking that I had better die by rebel bullets than [by] Union quackery.''

The attitudes which the Rebs and Yanks took toward each other were very much the same and ranged over the same gamut of feeling, from friendliness to extreme hatred. The Rebs were, to a Massachusetts corporal, ``fighting madmen or not men at all but whiskey + gunpowder put into a human frame.'' A Pennsylvania soldier wrote that ``they were the hardest looking set of men that Ever i saw they Looked as if they had been fed on vinegar and shavings.'' Private Jenkins Lloyd Jones of the Wisconsin Light Artillery wrote in his diary: ``I strolled among the Alabamans on the right, found some of the greenest specimens of humanity I think in the universe their ignorance being little less than the slave they despise with as imperfect a dialect' They Recooned as how you' uns all would be a heap wus to we' uns all'.'' In a similar vein, but writing from the opposite side, Thomas Taylor, a private in the 6th Alabama Volunteers, in a letter to his wife, stated: ``You know that my heart is with you but I never could have been satisfied to have staid at home when my country is invaded by a thievin foe By a set of cowardly Skunks whose Motto is Booty.