A Lieutenant at Eighteen

A Lieutenant at Eighteen by Oliver Optic is about a young man fighting on the side of the Union during the American Revolution who must reconcile his wide-eyed dreams and lover's heart with his duty to his country. Excerpt: «A Lieutenant at Eighteen» is the third of the series of «The Blue and the Gray—on Land.» The stirring events of thirty-four years ago, when the first gun of the Great Rebellion awoke the nation from its slumber of thirteen years of peace, transformed the older boys of the day into men. Thousands of them who lacked three or four years of their majority, and some of them even six or seven years of it, flocked to the standard of the imperiled Union."