Hard Tack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887) is a memoir by John D. Billings. Billings was a veteran of the 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Artillery Battery in the American Civil War. Originally published in 1888, Hard Tack and Coffee quickly became a best seller, and is now considered one of the most important books written by a Civil War veteran. The book is abundantly illustrated by the pen and ink drawings of Charles Reed, also a veteran, who served as bugler in the 9th Massachusetts Battery. Reed received the Medal of Honor for saving the life of his battery commander at Gettysburg. "Hard Tack and Coffee" is not about battles, but rather about how the common Union soldiers of the Civil War lived in camp and on the march. What would otherwise be a mundane subject is enlivened by Billings' humorous prose and Reed's superb drawings which are based on the sketches he kept in his journal during the war.
The book is noteworthy as it covers the details of regular soldier life and as such, has become a valuable resource for Civil War re-enactors.
Famous quotes containing the words hard, tack and/or coffee:
“On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hills suddenness resists, win so;
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will, implies delay, therefore now do:
Hard deeds, the bodys pains; hard knowledge too
The minds endeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the Sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.”
—John Donne (15721631)
“For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid.... Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of ones inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.”
—Coleman Dowell (19251985)