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This comes from a later period, but there is no doubt that many of the Boys of '61 would have had a wry smile on their faces while reading it:
I was now a soldier. That is, so far as the general public was concerned. Not that I yet had the thirteen dollars, or any part therof. That was six weeks yet in the offing.
True, I had a uniform -- cerulean-blue pants with a broad, deep blue stripe down the sides, and they fitted reasonably well. But my blouse! I had always thought that a "blouse" was specifically an article of feminine apparel, a sort of loose shirtwaist with a snappy, come-hither effect. But in that man's army, a blouse was anything worn outside a shirt and inside an overcoat, and instantly provocative of a sergeant's acute anguish if it wasn't buttoned. Also, it was supposed to fit.
They were short on blouses when mine was issued; that is, short of normal blouses for normal men. So my blouse was left over from some outsize predecessor, a mere fragment of whose clothing would have outfitted me inside and out, with a Sunday suit left over. The turned-back sleeves reached my elbows; the blouse folded around me so that its buttons were at all times under my arms, and it reached to my knees like a frock coat. But my choice was this, or not marching at all in the parade that would start us into the real war, at Camp Black out on Hempstead Plains, Long Island. So I took the blouse, crept into it, and marched, undoubtedly passing as some sort of regimental mascot.
- Charles Johnson Post, The Little War of Private Post
True, I had a uniform -- cerulean-blue pants with a broad, deep blue stripe down the sides, and they fitted reasonably well. But my blouse! I had always thought that a "blouse" was specifically an article of feminine apparel, a sort of loose shirtwaist with a snappy, come-hither effect. But in that man's army, a blouse was anything worn outside a shirt and inside an overcoat, and instantly provocative of a sergeant's acute anguish if it wasn't buttoned. Also, it was supposed to fit.
They were short on blouses when mine was issued; that is, short of normal blouses for normal men. So my blouse was left over from some outsize predecessor, a mere fragment of whose clothing would have outfitted me inside and out, with a Sunday suit left over. The turned-back sleeves reached my elbows; the blouse folded around me so that its buttons were at all times under my arms, and it reached to my knees like a frock coat. But my choice was this, or not marching at all in the parade that would start us into the real war, at Camp Black out on Hempstead Plains, Long Island. So I took the blouse, crept into it, and marched, undoubtedly passing as some sort of regimental mascot.
- Charles Johnson Post, The Little War of Private Post