Virginia. How stupid of me to come here. A city boy. I was recruited to this war in Toronto, at the university. A war with such atrocities piling up – we saw the images in the newspapers – that most thinking men refused to go. And so the US government created a tantalizing loophole. If you were a man of means, you could simply hire a substitute. They even called it substitution. And so we came – from all over the world – to fight for the cause of the freedom of all men in the stead of rich men who would rather get richer than die ignobly in a filthy farmer’s field. I know better now.
But in 1864, I was naïve enough to think that the war might be my ticket out of the middling hell my father was concocting for me: a white picket fence, a suitable wife, a life of desperation – or so, at the
