![]() ![]() The effects of the mental ordeal were permanent. Those glasses of wine were toasts to pain. Many of his friends were killed in battle, some of them in front of his eyes. He hoped the foot wouldhave to be amputated so he could be discharged, but it was spared, and he served out his commission. He was wounded three times in all, the third time in an engagement leading up to the battle of Chancellorsville, when he was shot in the foot. He fought bravely and he was resilient, but he was not strong in a brute sense, and as the war went on the physical ordeal was punishing. ![]() ![]() He was twenty years old and weighed just 136 pounds at the time of his first battle, at Ball's Bluff, where he was shot through the chest. Every year he drank a glass of wine in observance of the anniversary of the battle of Antietam, where he had been shot in the neck and left, briefly behind enemy lines, for dead.īut Holmes hated the war. The war was the central experience of his life, and he kept its memory alive. In later life, he loved to use military metaphors in his speeches and his conversation he didn't mind being referred to good-naturedly as Captain Holmes and he wore his enormous military mustaches until his death, in 1935, at the age of ninety-three. He stood six feet three inches tall and had a soldierly bearing. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., was an officer in the Union Army. ![]()
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