One of my more geeky pleasures is listening to audio books (usually while in the shower). Almost exclusively, these have been Civil War books. Having just finished Stephen Sears’s Gettysburg, I needed another. I searched the library and came across a book about the confederate partisan Mosby. The book, Mosby’s Men by John Henry Alexander was available for download, so I got it and started listening right away.

What I thought would be a history turns out to be a memoir. But the memoir isn’t a day-by-day account of what it was like to be with John S. Mosby. It is more of a collection of stories, happenings and slice-of-life scenarios than a narrative.

I love the writing style. It’s wordy and witty and can say the most bawdy things in very elegant ways.

One passage that made me giggle was about the ladies in Mosby’s Confederacy.

The women of Mosby’s Confederacy were the divinities to whom the Rangers were always true… never have I heard of a single instance of the betrayal by one of them of a too-confiding woman’s trust.

But I must continue to use the plural when I speak of each man’s “divinities.” If it is not good grammar, it is true—like Ben Jonson’s poetry that didn’t rhyme. The fact is that the boys were guilty of considerable laxity (or perhaps I should say liberality) in the matter of sweethearts. Their devotion to the sex was too ardent and profound to be exhausted by a single object, and they could not be absolutely loyal to Katie Wells and Gentle Annie both. The most that I can claim for a real Mosby man is that he could be perfectly “happy with either dear charmer, with t’other dear charmer away”— and this seemed to satisfy each in her turn.

Indeed, they were just as much sinned against as sinning in this regard. The dear girls took their liberties too. For instance: After the Greenback raid, the boys were pretty flush. Among other means which two of them took to get the good of their money before they died, they sent across the Potomac for engagement rings for their best girls. Now it happened that they sent by the same blockade-runner and he brought back two handsome bands which were exact “twinses.” In due course and with all proper ceremony they were set as seals to the pure and endless love which they were intended to symbolize. The swains soon made an unexpected call together upon a certain lady, and you can imagine the satisfaction with which they discovered both rings on the same finger. Some embarrassment arose in the adjustment of relations, but as neither fellow could identify his property, the girl remained mistress of the situation and of the rings.

One belle of the Confederacy, a girl “of a provident mind,” thought to hedge against the casualties of war by placing her bets, so to speak, judiciously around—some in Mosby’s command, and some in different branches of the regular service. She played to great luck, and after the surrender claimants for her heart and hand turned up from various directions. I happened to be at one of her levees (as a spectator) and could not but admire the skill with which she met the embarrassing situation and made each one happy in the assurance that he was the favorite. However, one of those accidents which will happen, betrayed the truth. Whereupon her victims held a caucus and unanimously passed a resolution that she was too smart for domestic purposes.