Trooper Tales — page 196: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

182. ‘The Aberration of Private Brown. I see a pathetic finish for Brown when the maid hears about it—oh!’ “Get leary, old man,” I whispered, excitedly, at this moment, “the boys are coming back.” Brown’s derangement assumed a suicidal mania at once. Corp. Kennedy was exhausted in the course of an hour through his efforts to keep the patient from doing himself bodily harm. Now, the corporal was a conscientious man. It was this trait, chiefly, which caused the troop commander to put him in charge of Brown, the much deplored. It would be a long story, indeed, to relate how the Porto Rican children pointed to my poor friend, and then touched their own foreheads, whispering to each other: “Toco—Americano soldato, loco.” It would be a long, sad story to tell how poor Brown was confined in the rear smoking-room of the transport, and how Corp. Kennedy insisted that either he or I must be awake with the patient all the time. It was a burden of peculiar and crushing weight for Brown to bear, when the sick and discharged soldiers going back to the States would peer through the loopholes of the smoking-room and make remarks such as these: “Why, he washes his face all right,” or “It’s a wonder they don’t keep him in a straitjacket,”’ or “He’s a savage- looking lunatic,” and others. The conscientious manner, too, in which Corp. Ken- nedy did his duty, had an oppressive and unpacifiying ef- fect upon Brown, whose violent intervals occurred only Eomicbooks; co